Category Archives: Crime

Strange Sally Diamond

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Yes, the eponymous protagonist of Liz Nugent’s new crime mystery, Strange Sally Diamond, is strange. And for good reason. Like Nita Prose’s The Maid (another excellent book), this is a protagonist with some unspecified cognitive difference, and in both books it is interesting to see how the authors create a consistent and believable character who processes information in a quirky way.

Sally lives a mile outside a small village in Ireland’s sparsely populated Roscommon County. Alone with her father since her Mum’s death, Sally is in her early forties and has become her father’s caretaker. She’s not one bit social, but because of his illness, she’s had to go into the village to do errands and buy groceries. She keeps her interactions with the villagers to a minimum by pretending to be deaf.

When her Dad dies, she takes literally his jocular advice, ‘Just put me out with the bins,’ and attempts to cremate him in an incinerator barrel. To Sally’s surprise, this brings the police and the media and the merely curious to her door. Sally’s chance to keep others out of her life are now zero. She is constantly learning and fine-tuning how to relate to all of them. No real-life experience has taught her there should be a funeral and that backyard cremation wouldn’t go. When others arrange a funeral, she wears a red-sequined beret, because Dad said it was “for special occasions.”

Sally’s steep learning curve may make you think about the demands of society differently. How much we take for granted in our relations with other people and the world around us!

Sally’s biological mother, Denise Norton, was kidnapped at age eleven and held captive for almost sixteen years by a misogynistic psychopath named Conor Geary. By doling out devastating new revelations about this experience and its tragic aftermath, chapter by chapter, Nugent keeps the story tension high. It’s a fine, well-paced piece of storytelling.

Denise was finally found (thanks to a burglar) with a young daughter—Sally—and their captor fled. Under psychiatric care, Denise committed suicide. The people Sally first thought of as ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’ were the physician and psychiatrist who cared for her and Denise. At first their adopting her seems a kindness, but I found the psychiatrist father to be every bit as controlling as Conor Geary, at least in a psychological sense. That need for control, who has it, who doesn’t, is a powerful theme here. And Sally isn’t the only child who was affected.

Nugent writes with sincere compassion for the lives warped by Geary—not just his kidnap victims but their children, their siblings left behind, and the parents who never knew what happened to them. Although Strange Sally Diamond is a smooth read, one that propels you forward, it offers a lot to think about, and it won’t leave you quickly.

We’ll Be Right Back — After This! Crime Short Stories

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When you’re not in the mood to tackle a whole novel, reading a short story or two, or twelve, can fill the bill. This collection from Murderous Ink Press titled We’ll Be Right Back—After This! is a good one to keep on hand for just those situations. The mostly U.S. tales are geographically wide-ranging and twisty. Several display a good bit of humor, a couple are on the cozy side while some aim for noir, and the range is suggested by the three selected for longer treatment below. We start our underbelly tour on the U.S. west coast.

“Blood on the Stairs” by Jim Guigli features his character, Sacramento, California’s down-at-heels private eye Bart Lasiter. A woman dies on the stairway of his office building, apparently on her way to see him. She was fatally stabbed by one of Bart’s own promotional pencils, bearing the painfully ironic slogan, “I’m ready to help.” The Chicago woman was attending an annual Crime Happens conference. You can tell Guigli has paid his dues at such events by the way he describes the posturing, self-promotion, back-biting—it’s all there. The story moves along steadily toward the deadline the Lasiter and the cops face—solving the case before the conference ends and the participants scatter across the country. Where, if the other stories in this collection are any indication, more crimes await.

“Cruel as the Grave” by Eve Fisher is a story about relationships—bad ones, of course, set in a remote area of South Dakota. The story has so many twists and turns, I didn’t see the end coming at all. Jackie is the pivot around which two other women revolve: one a lawyer, the other a hedonist. They’re uneasy with each other and for good reason. What I really liked about Fisher’s story were the unexpected motivations of the characters that made the ending so believable.

Three of the stories originated outside the United States. In “A Long Dark Road,” by Canadian author Joan Hall Hovey, an elderly widow traveling a lonely road at night meets an unexpected fate. Yorkshire author Madeleine McDonald writes about a spurned woman who frames her errant lover for her own death in “Watching Over You.”

Finally, “Memindip Solves a Problem” by Jay Andrew Connor takes place in an unnamed African country. Memindip is a ghost (?) who avenges wrongful deaths. One evening, he returns to life in a jazz nightclub where a beautiful woman sings. The lights go out. A shot. The lights come on, the singer is dead. The atmosphere of the seedy club, the heat of the crowded city, and especially the tenor of Memindip’s conversations with his taxi driver reinforce the story’s foreign locale. Memindip discovers that the singer wasn’t killed by a bullet, but a good-sized pearl. Such a riveting image! Altogether, a charming tale.

A longer review, covering all this publication’s excellent stories, is available at CrimeFictionLover.com. Order here from Amazon

The Bone Records

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What’s most fun about Rich Zahradnik’s new crime thriller set in Brooklyn, The Bone Records, is the peek into worlds most of us haven’t experienced first-hand. It tells the story of Grigg (Grigoriy) Orlov, whose father has been missing for five months. Grigg is trying to find him.

As the story begins, Grigg searches for Dad between his daytime job working for the city and a more intriguing evening gig at Coney Island’s Conquistador Arcade. He has scoured his Coney Island neighborhood and the Little Odessa portion of Brighton Beach, where Russian émigrés like his father gravitate. A high school teacher, his father was well known and liked. Surely, someone must have an idea whom his father might have connected with, where he might have gone.

Grigg doesn’t fit into the community the way his father always has. His mother, who died when he was a toddler, was from Jamaica. To the Russians, he will always be an outsider. The author gives you a good sense of Grigg’s anxieties and makes them seem well-founded. He feels out of place, and you feel it too.

Late one night, asleep in his empty house, Grigg is awakened by an intruder. It’s Dad! But hard on his heels is a man with a gun. The Orlovs try to escape, and his father is mortally wounded. He leaves Grigg two things: his dying words, which are “Get to Katia. Katia Sokolov—” and a strange black tube. Katia’s and Grigg’s fathers were best friends and left the Soviet Union together. She may know something, but her orbit is another place he doesn’t seem to fit.

Once he and Katia unroll the tube, they discover it is a bootleg sound recording (and not a good one) of the old Buddy Holly song, “Not Fade Away.” In the 1950s, when the Soviet Union was busily banning Western music and performers, rock n roll fans recorded blacklisted songs on discarded X rays and surreptitiously sold and traded them. They called them bone records. Author Zahradnik provides just enough background information about Soviet life to suggest the secrets the fathers left behind. Very possibly, the past has now reached out to snare his father, and maybe Grigg too.

He’s convinced the police won’t give the investigation a good try, and in a well-worn staple of amateur detective fiction, decides he will have to investigate the murder himself. Katia will help. This quest brings him into inevitable conflict with the Russian mafia, vicious crime lords who dominate Little Odessa. Constantly running into new dangers, he’s on a carousel whirling faster and faster. To get off is to die.

The story’s Coney Island amusement park backdrop was fun, and I enjoyed the complex web of relationships in the local Russian émigré community. The neighborhood comprises just a few square blocks in south Brooklyn, yet gives this thriller a distinctive flavor. The result is as much a roller coaster ride for the reader as a turn on the Coney Island Cyclone.

Rich Zarahdnik is the author of the Coleridge Taylor mysteries, including Lights Out Summer, which won the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America in 2018.

Closure–Is It a Realistic Goal?

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote two web posts about a real-life murder that took place in Atlantic County, New Jersey, in 2012. Still unsolved. My summaries were based on a pages-long newspaper story by Rebecca Everett. Several of the people she interviewed said outright or implied that the mishandling of the investigation and prosecution kept the family from having closure.

“Closure” is something we hear a lot about after tragedies. But that seems a slippery concept to me. Is there such a thing, really? Or, after a violent episode are people haunted by some combination of guilt and wishful thinking that suggests they or Someone surely could have done Something? They don’t even have to say specifically what those Somethings were, though they may have specifics in mind. Do they tell themselves that they shouldn’t have let their teenager take the car on that rainy night? That they should have kept their child with a stuffy nose home from school that day? That they always knew there was something off about Uncle Max? And on and on.

Even in cases where a death isn’t unexpected, when it isn’t a sudden catastrophe, does this same second-guessing come into play? Do was ask ourselves, Why didn’t I insist she get her mammogram? Why didn’t I say I’d drive him to those AA meetings? Maybe I’m mixing up “closure” and “guilt” or “responsibility.” Or maybe they are somehow cousins.

You’d think the most unequivocal sort of closure would come in death penalty cases, in which victims’ family members are allowed to witness the execution of their loved one’s murderer. It turns out it doesn’t work that way. Not always.

Said the mother of a slain Houston police officer, “I wanted to be sure it was finished, and that’s why I went.” Possibly, this mother did achieve closure. “It was just too humane,” said the mother of a murdered daughter. No closure for her. (The first quote is from a 2017 New York Times story, the second from WebMD.) Perhaps the experience gives the viewer a feeling of retribution, but it doesn’t offer consolation. The loss is still real and present, the empty chair still there. Revenge seems to me a totally different animal than closure.

As a writer of crime fiction, I have to think about this, even in my stumbling way. Recently, I read a story about a private investigator whose client was murdered in a set-up the investigator himself engineered. Although I didn’t expect (or want) the fictional investigator to lapse into a full-blown depression, he doesn’t question his actions, take any responsibility for the death, demonstrate any regret. This struck me as unrealistic and unsatisfying. I guess you could say this particular character achieved closure with no trouble at all. He would have been a better person if he hadn’t.

Blue Book by Tom Harley Campbell

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In the mid-sized, middle-America town of Dayton, Ohio, retired homicide detective John Burke isn’t wildly happy about the reduced pace of his life, but in this quick-moving new thriller by Tom Harley Campbell, unexpected trouble—and a fascinating mystery—are headed straight toward him. They arrive in the form of 18-year-old Alex Johnson, all the way from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Alex’s father was a Mississippi cop whose body was found in Dayton’s Mad River four years earlier. Not solving that case has haunted Burke ever since. Now Alex provides a tantalizing clue.

A news story starts another pot simmering. Al-Jazeera reports that Yasser Arafat died from polonium210 poisoning. Deeply interested in this development is Hattiesburg history professor Charles Robinson. He’s haunted by the mysterious 2004 death of his own father, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, which Charles believes was also a polonium poisoning. Charles’s father had a secret, post-World War II assignment in Dayton, called Project Blue Book (in real life), to investigate reports of UFOs (now called Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), and determine whether they threaten national security.

In the post-War era, while the older Robinson was sifting evidence, the Air Force, the military, and the Central Intelligence Agency conducted an unrelenting public information campaign to discredit UFO reports and depict the believers as tin-foil-hat-wearing kooks. (Last week, Enigma Labs released a mobile app in which users can report and record an unexplainable event as it happens, potentially turning random anecdotal information into data.)

Whether you believe UFOs exist or not, you will understand that, in dicey situations, it’s always the cover-up that presents the greatest difficulties. The more extreme the effort to hide something, the more important it’s likely to be. Project Blue Book’s work and conclusions have been secret for fifty years. As John Burke probes the death of these two fathers, the campaign to cover up Project Blue Book seems to threaten all of them.

John Burke is an exceedingly likeable character. He may be retired, but don’t sell him short. There’s a complex plot here, as befits a story with so many deep secrets, housed in an inaccessible area of Dayton’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Author Campbell effectively conveys the intimate feel of Dayton (population less than 140,000), a relatively small dog wagged by the big tail of the defense, aerospace, and aviation industries. A local police department can’t help but feel that a giant hovers over its shoulder. And that giant, Burke learns, isn’t always friendly.

There’s just enough science here to make the story interesting and give it plausibility, without weighing it down. Campbell does an especially good job interleaving actual events with his fictional tale. It’s a wild ride, and a fun one! You can order it here with my affiliate link.

Want more? The multi-episode docuseries, “UFOs: Investigating the Unknown” premieres on the National Geographic TV channel Feb. 13.

It’s News to Me by RG Belsky

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The fifth entry in former New York City newsman RG Belsky’s Clare Carlson series includes all the features his fans have come to appreciate—an interesting plot, brisk pacing, and, best of all, the self-deprecating wit and chutzpah of Clare herself.

In this story, Clare’s Manhattan newsroom is abuzz about the murder of Riley Hunt, a beautiful blonde-haired, blue-eyed college co-ed with everything going for her. Just the kind of ratings-bait television news loves to exploit. Clare herself is fully aware of the other tragedies, the other deaths that get shunted to the background in favor of those of “blonde white single female” victims, but ratings are ratings.

Clare began as a newspaper journalist and was probably always a cynical observer of the rush and foibles of New York life. When her newspaper folded, she took a job as news director at a local television station, and she can’t get completely past thinking television news coverage is just a little beneath her. But, hey, a girl’s got to eat.

It all sort of perks along until the station owner throws a spanner in the works. He’s bumping Clare’s long-time boss upstairs to be a consultant, a make-work job if Clare ever heard of one, and hiring a new executive producer. The new gal is known for dramatically increasing station ratings, and she doesn’t care what tricks she has to use to do so. Naturally, Clare loathes her before they’ve even met. Susan makes it clear she’s in charge and won’t put up with Clare’s tendency to go off on her own and make decisions without the approval of Management.

Like Clare, you will be girding yourself for the inevitable confrontations between them. Yet, much as Susan blusters and threatens, she can’t quite rid herself of this annoying staffer, with her Pulitzer Prize and her record of breaking important stories.

The reportage of Riley Hunt’s death is expected to come to an end after a homeless veteran is arrested and charged with the crime. He has Riley’s cell phone, and her blood is on both it and him. We Belsky fans know this tidy conclusion won’t satisfy Clare. She continues to investigate, but the way things are going, she is certain to offend one or more powerful men.

Clare’s doggedness keeps reader interest alive, and a string of new revelations comes quickly. As much as they change the situation, what doesn’t change is Clare’s irreverent humor. She kept me chuckling with her spirited repartee. Belsky has quite deftly developed the voice of Clare, and she may seem like a few people you know—or want to know.

Despite Clare’s terrible track record with her personal relationships, her friend Janet keeps trying to fix her up, and her latest, a Princeton University Spanish professor, seems more than promising.

As a college journalism major myself, I have a soft spot for stories about newsrooms, intrepid reporters, and the tension between the fast pace of new events and the slow and painstaking work of investigation, not to mention the conundrums that face an increasingly embattled profession. I look forward to each new adventure of Clare and her team, and so will you. 

Order from Amazon here with my affiliate link.

Annals of New Jersey Crime, Part 2

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Yesterday’s post described the murder of Atlantic County, N.J., man John Kingsbury and the flawed investigation into his death, in which martial arts gym owner Michael Castro was the chief suspect.

Castro’s Day—Make that Decade—in Court

On April 5, 2013, 15 months after John Kingsbury’s murder at his Atlantic County home, the county prosecutor authorized charges of murder and felony murder against Michael Castro. While Castro languished in jail for 15 months, his lawyer diligently picked apart the prosecution’s case. He made plenty of holes in it, and a judge dismissed the murder indictment in June 2014.

In January 2016, the investigators obtained a second murder indictment. By that time, new evidence suggested that two people connected to Castro’s martial arts gym might have committed the crime or participated in it, further muddying the waters. Castro wasn’t jailed this time, but required to wear an ankle monitor for the next 15 months.

A man known to both Castro and his friend Lauren Kohl (whose missing gun apparently was the murder weapon) was driving Kohl’s Jeep Wrangler back and forth near the Kingsbury home shortly before the murder occurred there, and his alibi for the actual presumed time of the murder didn’t hold up. Investigators waited another 19 months to confront him about these actions.

A teenager whom Reporter Rebecca Everett describes as “Castro’s martial arts protégé” matched a witness description of a person seen near the house. He had no alibi for the afternoon of the death. Again the investigators dawdled, and when they asked for the youth’s cellphone data two years later, the company no longer retained it. By May 2017, prosecutors believed they could not win the case against Michael Castro and dropped the charges.

Impact on Michael Castro

Years of uncertainty had taken a toll on Michael Castro. He’d filed a civil rights lawsuit in 2015, put on hold when the second indictment came down. After the dropped charges, his lawyer dug in, finding in his investigation of the investigation “a pattern of deliberate misconduct.”

Such suits rarely succeed, but in 2021, a U.S. District Judge decided the problems were big enough that a jury should decide. New shortcomings in the investigation emerged—failure to document meetings, text exchanges, and steps in the investigation, including interviews and the results of a photo lineup. Those flaws were on top of the mishandling of evidence, inadequate case preparation, and damaging delays.

In a rare outcome in such suits, Castro received a $5 million settlement.

And in the Court of Public Opinion

Castro made a 37-minute YouTube video posted August 2021. In it, he talks about his initial surprise at being considered a suspect, his arrest more than a year later, and his months in jail and with the monitor. He talks about his abusive mother, his absent stepfather, the ten different schools he attended, his military service and resultant PTSD, and his persistent financial problems. Twice accused of murder, yet never convicted, he can’t escape public suspicion.

Says the dead man’s son, Glenn, “The whole thing’s awful. And it’s gonna go on till the day I die. And in theory, it may go on till the day my children die.”

Did Michael Castro get away with murder, or is he another victim?

Parts 1 and 2 of this story are based primarily on reporting by Rebecca Everett for the Trenton, N.J., Times.

Annals of New Jersey Crime

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The Trenton, N.J., Times, recently devoted several pages to a true-crime mystery from the Garden State. Reporter Rebecca Everett detailed the investigation and failed prosecutions of the murder of 77-year-old John Kingsbury. Kingsbury died on Super Bowl Sunday 2012 at his home in Mullica, a rural township in New Jersey’s Pinelands area. His son Glenn, who returned home and discovered the body, as well as first responders, thought a fall or stroke accounted for the blood on and around the elderly man’s head. None of them saw the bullet holes from a gun described as “small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.”

Glenn and his girlfriend, Karen Drew, cleaning up, found two spent .380 shell casings and called emergency services immediately. Too late. John died before reaching the hospital, and they had just cleaned up a murder scene. Now, eleven years later, no one has been convicted of John Kingsbury’s murder. Reporter Everett says the cold case is “filled with enough shocking twists, shadowy characters and law enforcement bungling to fill a ‘Knives Out’ sequel.”

Who are John and Glenn Kingsbury?

John Kingsbury was a retired RCA electronics specialist, a member of Mensa, and Korean War veteran who trained K-9s. In shaky health, he’d moved to New Jersey a few months before his death to live with his son. Glenn and Karen own lucrative cheerleading event companies Cheer Tech and Spirit Brands. When they return home after a typical event, they’re holding tens of thousands of dollars in cash. “Anyone who worked with them would know that,” Everett wrote, “Including Michael Castro.”

Robbery seemed the likely motive.

The Crime

John Kingsbury was at home alone when the killer or killers arrived at the family home. There was no weekend’s worth of event receipts, Karen Drew had already taken them to the bank.

Police found no indication of a break-in, and nothing appeared to be missing, but, unexpectedly, the video surveillance system had been disabled. Karen’s suspicion immediately fell on Castro, who she said had been pestering her that afternoon with cell phone calls about her and family members’ whereabouts. What’s more, Castro owed Glenn several thousand dollars, some of which he’d used to set up a mixed martial arts studio.

After the lead detective, Michael Mattioli, interviewed Castro four days after the killing, Castro immediately called a Camden County Sheriff’s Officer he knew, Lauren Kohl. It wasn’t until after she was contacted by Mattioli that Kohl reported two handguns missing from her home.

An Investigation Botched from the Start

The Atlantic County prosecutors worked on the case against Michael Castro for more than a year, in an investigation “torpedoed by errors and oversights,” Everett was told. Among them:

  • Investigators lost track of John’s cellphone, so it couldn’t be analyzed for years
  • They had a warrant to search Castro’s vehicle, but didn’t do it
  • They didn’t ask the medical examiner to estimate the time of the shooting
  • They didn’t collect surveillance footage from area stores that might have confirmed whether Castro (or other possible suspects) were in the area
  • They didn’t subpoena the cellphones of other possible suspects to confirm their locations
  • And, when it appeared one of Lauren Kohl’s missing handguns might be the murder weapon (and eventually was proved to be, on what basis is unclear, as the gun is apparently still missing), it was months before investigators actually followed up with her.

During this period, the prosecutor’s office had internal organizational problems, handing off the Kingsbury murder to three separate lead investigators in just over a year. Months passed between any investigatory actions they logged, with much not logged at all. The cellphone evidence fell apart. Stories changed. New suspects emerged, fogging the investigatory lenses.

Tomorrow: Michael Castro’s Day—Make that Decade—in Court

Thanks, Ellery Queen!

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As always, the Jan-Feb issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine is packed with good reading. Here are some of the standout stories for me:

“The Killing of Henry Davenport” by John Shen Yen Nee and S.J. Rozan – Admittedly, this story, set in London in 1924, was bound to be a hit with me, as it involves both Sherlock Holmes and my favorite detective, Dee Goong An (hearkening back to a real-life personage from the Tang Dynasty). Holmes, Watson, Dee, and the narrator, Lao She (another real-life character), set out to solve an English murder in which a Chinese man stands accused. The story is a foretaste of a new project Rozan is working on that fans (me!) eagerly await.

“The Soiled Dove of Shallow Hollow” by Sean McCluskey – It’s always fun to see a nicely crafted story in the mag’s Department of First Stories. A hint of more good stuff to come. And I’m easily seduced by a con job where the question of who’s being conned is up for grabs. Nice!

“The Bowser Boys Are Back in Town” by Hal Charles – You can expect some humor in a story that begins, “Like a loud rooster, the bomb in Beverly Dezarn Memorial Park awoke the entire town of Woodhole . . .” The bad-luck Bowser duo is on what turns out to be an all-too-brief (for them) return home from jail, but it looks like they’re headed back to the slammer.

“Can the Cat Catch the Rat” by Steve Hockensmith – This is another in his entertaining series about Big Red and Old Red Amlingmeyer, tyro detectives in an Old West where the frequent shenanigans offers steady employment. The surprise in this episode is that Old Red has finally agreed to let Big Red teach him to read. However, identifying the counterfeit coins someone’s producing requires nothing more than a healthy set of teeth.

Read these and more good stories in EQMM. Subscribe here!

The Pain Tourist by Paul Cleave

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What I like about the two Paul Cleave thrillers I’ve read is how he ties social behavior into the story of a crime and investigation. In his work, Internet frenzies make bad situations worse, leaving me thinking, “Oh, yeah. I can see that happening.”

In the first book of his I read, The Quiet People, a couple suspected of harming their child is besieged by angry would-be vigilantes camping out in front of their home. Suspicions inflamed by social media are enough to produce a crowd edging toward violence. The Pain Tourist touches on people’s fascination with true-crime stories and their willingness to believe they are competent and informed enough to become investigators themselves. You’ve seen this in action if you watched the discovery+ channel’s 2021 series Citizen P.I. In the official confusion and near-vacuum of information after the recent killings at the University of Idaho, the amateurs stepped in.

Amateurs have provided helpful information in a number of instances. They’re good at code-cracking, occasionally find missing persons, and willing to delve into cold cases. But more ambitious self-assigned tasks, such as identifying pedophiles and targeting presumed perpetrators can get dangerous for both the citizen and the accused, who may, in fact, be innocent. This is particularly so when accusers decide to take action.

Authorities worry they can jam up an investigation, overwhelming police with “tips” that need to be checked out (more than 6,000 in the Idaho case in the first three weeks after the crimes). In Cleave’s writing, these true crime devotees are pain tourists.

Taut. Twisty. Propulsive. You can trot out all the cliches regularly used to describe thriller fiction and use them with abandon for The Pain Tourist.

A home invasion leaves Frank and Avah Garrett dead. Nine years later, their 19-year-old son, James, remains in a coma with a bullet wound to the brain, and their 14-year-old daughter, Hazel, is trying to piece a life together. The three men seen running from the Garrett home have never been identified.

While Christchurch Detective Rebecca Kent investigates a serial murderer case, alternating chapters provide insight into what’s going on inside James’s head. A lot, and it’s fascinating. His mind is constructing an alternative reality – one in which his parents don’t die and he and Hazel carry on their lives as they would have been. Eight years and 10 months after the attack, in the now of the novel, James wakes up.

As he describes his memories during those years, Hazel and his doctor see correlations with real-life events. James calls what’s in his head Coma World. In Coma World, he had adventures that drew from the books Hazel read to him. The dates he believes certain events occurred match reality. Naturally, the police want to talk to him to find out whether this amazing memory contains clues from that fatal night. He agrees to try. It’s an intriguing possibility, with loads of implications.

Detective Inspector Rebecca Kent is assigned to James’s case, and because her old friend, retired Detective Inspector Theodore Tate, worked the original case, she gets in touch. He’s now working as a technical advisor for true crime television shows, and Cleave nicely portrays the rise in true crime ‘entertainments’, the dark side of the audience obsession and the shamelessness of the media.

Cleave has a special talent for misdirection, which you don’t fully appreciate until near the book’s end, when several investigations start to come together most satisfactorily. Kent and Tate share one serious concern, that the men who killed James’s parents will come back to finish the job.

Rebecca Kent and Theodore Tate are solidly written characters. Hazel and James’s relationship is especially close, a cup of kindness in a vat of cruelty. James and his prodigious abilities form a completely believable, highly sympathetic character. And, along the way, numerous minor characters are given enough detail for plausibility. Maybe the bad guys are a bit too irredeemable, though that merely raises the stakes. This is a fast-moving, engaging story that has something to say and is hard to put down.

Read more:
The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America’s Coldest Cases, by Deborah Halber – “Part whodunit, part sociological study . . . The result is eminently entertaining.”