Today I am sharing my Feature Post and Book Review on the Damppebbles blog tour for the first book in a hopefully new crime fiction/mystery series featuring DI Kate Young. AN EYE FOR AN EYE (Detective Kate Young Book #1) by Carol Wyer.
Below you will find a book blurb, my book review, an about the author section and the authors social media links. Enjoy!
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Book Blurb
A killer running rings around the police. A detective spiralling out of control.
DI Kate Young is on leave. She’s the force’s best detective, but her bosses know she’s under pressure, on medication and overcoming trauma. So after her bad judgement call leads to a narrowly averted public disaster, they’re sure all she needs is a rest.
But when Staffordshire Police summon her back to work on a murder case, it’s a harder, more suspicious Kate Young who returns. With a new ruthlessness, she sets about tracking down a clinical, calculating serial killer who is torturing victims and leaving clues to taunt the police. Spurred on by her reporter husband, Young begins to suspect that the murderer might be closer than she ever imagined.
As she works to uncover the truth, Young unravels a network of secrets and lies, with even those closest to her having something to hide. But with her own competence—and her grip on reality—called into question, can she unmask the killer before they strike again?
AN EYE FOR AN EYE (Detective Kate Young Book #1) by Carol Wyer is the first book in a hopefully new British police procedural crime fiction/mystery series featuring DI Kate Young.
DI Kate Young is suffering after a traumatic incident. She is having flashbacks and taking pills and alcohol to cope. After a narrowly avoiding hurting a civilian, her superintendent places her on forced leave in March.
Just three months later, Kate’s friend and fellow officer DCI Chase comes to tell her she is requested specifically for a murder investigation by her superintendent. In a small team, just two of her fellow officers, DS Morgan Meredith and DS Emma Donaldson, they work diligently to track down a ruthless killer who tortures his victims and taunts the police. This case is a tangled web of secrets, lies and vengeance.
Everyone worries about Kate’s mental state, but Kate is determined to prove she is able to work the evidence and clues step-by-step to catch the killer.
I could not put this book down! Kate is an absolutely stellar new main character that I am looking forward to following. Her personal story, which is intertwined in bits throughout the entire book, had me as intrigued as the crime/mystery itself. The plot moves at a steady pace and is full of red herrings and twists. Although the murders are gruesome, they do not occur on the page and are only discussed and in the forensics after the fact.
This book has me wanting the next book immediately! I highly recommend this new British police procedural crime fiction and author.
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About the Author
USA Today bestselling author and winner of The People’s Book Prize Award, Carol Wyer writes feel-good comedies and gripping crime fiction.
A move from humour to the ‘dark side’ in 2017, saw the introduction of popular DI Robyn Carter in LITTLE GIRL LOST and demonstrated that stand-up comedian Carol had found her true niche.
To date, her crime novels have sold over 750,000 copies and been translated for various overseas markets.
Carol has been interviewed on numerous radio shows discussing ”Irritable Male Syndrome’ and ‘Ageing Disgracefully’ and on BBC Breakfast television. She has had articles published in national magazines ‘Woman’s Weekly’, featured in ‘Take A Break’, ‘Choice’, ‘Yours’ and ‘Woman’s Own’ magazines and the Huffington Post.
She currently lives on a windy hill in rural Staffordshire with her husband Mr Grumpy… who is very, very grumpy.
When she is not plotting devious murders, she can be found performing her comedy routine, Smile While You Still Have Teeth.
THE CONVENT by Sarah Sheridan is the first book, in a what I hope will be a new amateur sleuth series, featuring Sister Veronica Angelica, a Catholic nun residing in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in the center of Soho, London.
Sister Veronica Angelica writes mystery novels in secret that she does not share, except with a fellow Sister in her Convent and she has a penchant for custard cream biscuits. She also has lived her entire life with a secret that has shaped her choice in vocation and personal beliefs in the rules and dogma of the Catholic Church.
When she discovers a young man, Jamie who has been working at the youth hostel next door to the Convent dead in the courtyard, she is forbidden by the local Cardinal to notify law enforcement and keep the discovery to herself. Jamie had a secret that he was about to reveal to Sister Veronica and she is determined to find out what it was and not let his death be covered up.
As Sister Veronica works to find justice for Jamie, she is helped by new friends. She is also finding out that there is something much deeper and sinister happening in the diocese with ties all the way to Rome. Will Sister Veronica be able to solve the case before the killer silences her?
I love Sister Veronica! This book was not what I was expecting, but I really enjoyed it. The mystery is compelling and keeps becoming more so as Sister Veronica and her friends discover the depth of the corruption and willingness to kill to cover it up. Even though it is an amateur sleuth mystery and does contain lighter moments with the more intense, the author does not hold back on including real life scandals in the news regarding the Catholic Church and has Sister Veronica questioning and contemplating her own beliefs vs. the Church’s beliefs and dogma.
I highly recommend this new amateur sleuth mystery and hope for many more books to follow this introduction to Sister Veronica and her friends!
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About the Author
Sarah was born in London and now lives in a village in South Northamptonshire. She gained a Masters degree in Eighteenth-Century French and English art from the Courtauld Institute of Art, before teaching art in secondary schools for thirteen years. After working with human rights organisations that protect minority groups from institutional abuse, Sarah worked towards a PhD at The Open University, researching the effect of secrecy on marginalised people, specifically the biological children of Roman Catholic priests. She has spoken about her research on various news programmes for the BBC and other media outlets around the world. It was this sense of secrecy and silencing that became the inspiration for her first crime novel, The Convent.
Sarah is hugely obsessed with reading and is amassing such an unrealistically large book collection that some of it is now in storage. She is also addicted to writing, and after inventing stories (mostly in secret) from a young age and having various articles and short stories published, she wrote a children’s book, The Top Secret Diary of Davina Dupree – inspired by her daughter – in 2013. Overjoyed to hear that young readers were enjoying the story, she went on to write a series about Davina Dupree.
When she is not looking after her three children and menagerie of pets, or going for long walks with her wonderful partner Rich, Sarah can be found writing, while consuming large amounts of chocolate.
A MERCIFUL PROMISE (Mercy Kilpatrick Book #6) by Kendra Elliot is another edge-of-your-seat mystery/suspense/FBI thriller and I am sad to say the final book in the series. If you love an action-packed series with a uniquely strong female protagonist then this is the series for you.
FBI Agent Mercy Kilpatrick is asked to go undercover by the ATF when their agent becomes ill. She will be paired with another ATF agent already infiltrated into an anti-government group they believe have stolen firearms to sell for some unknown plot.
At the same time that Mercy has gone undercover, Truman is made aware of a puzzling series of murders. They are all men, shot once in the head and dumped in random locations. When the third victim turns out to be the agent Mercy was with on assignment, the ATF, FBI and Truman all come together to find Mercy and shut down the camp.
I have been putting off reading and reviewing this book because I have not wanted to leave Mercy and Truman’s world behind. Mercy has changed so much over these six books. She was so isolated starting in book one and now she has so many people she loves and that care about her. Truman is the perfect match for her. He has always understood what makes Mercy unique. All the characters, good and bad are realistic and seem as though they could walk right off the page. The plot pulls you in and the tension continues to build with unexpected twists while moving at a faster and faster pace to the ultimate climax. I was very happy when I read the last chapter that tied up Mercy and Truman’s lives together moving into the future even as I still want to visit.
I highly recommend this Mercy Kilpatrick book, the entire series and this author!
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Author Bio
Kendra Elliot has landed on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list multiple times and is the award-winning author of the Bone Secrets and Callahan & McLane series, as well as the Mercy Kilpatrick novels: A Merciful Death, A Merciful Truth, and A Merciful Secret. Kendra is a three-time winner of the Daphne du Maurier Award, an International Thriller Writers finalist, and an RT Award finalist. She has always been a voracious reader, cutting her teeth on classic female heroines such as Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, and Laura Ingalls. She was born, raised, and still lives in the rainy Pacific Northwest with her husband and three daughters, but she looks forward to the day she can live in flip-flops. Visit her at www.kendraelliot.com.
Today is my turn on the Harlequin Trade Publishing Mystery and Thriller Winter 2021 Blog Tour. I am very excited to be sharing my Feature Post and Book Review for AFTERSHOCK (Dr. Jessie Teska Mystery #2) by Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell. This is a thrilling follow-up to the first book in the series, First Cut and I could not put either down.
Below you will find an author Q&A, a book summary, my book review, an excerpt from the book and the author’s bio and social media links. Enjoy!
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Author Q&A
Q: Please give the elevator pitch for Aftershock.
A: San Francisco medical examiner Dr. Jessie Teska can’t let a famous architect found on a construction site be quietly laid in his grave. She digs deep, both in the morgue and outside it, to find out what really happened to him. When she does, the shock waves could be worse than the earthquake that has just shaken up the city and her own life.
Q: Which came first: the characters or plot line?
A: The characters. We introduced Jessie Teska and much of the supporting cast in our debut thriller, First Cut, when Jessie was a rookie at the San Francisco medical examiner’s office. All of our plot lines come from the what-if storytelling toolkit, applying our imaginations and a noir detective story’s narrative structure to Judy’s actual experience as a San Francisco medical examiner, a job she worked for nine years—going to death scenes, performing autopsies, interviewing witnesses, and testifying in murder trials as an expert witness.
Q: Why do you love Jessie and why should readers root for her?
A: We love Jessie because she is smart, uncompromising, fearless—and, good Lord but she gets in her own way sometimes, like we all do. She is a reliable narrator and she calls it like she sees it, and our books are written from her point of view as a first-person narrator. But Jessie is human and impetuous and inexperienced in her job, so she makes mistakes. She is impolitic and blunt, and maybe a little too literal-minded, with a scientist’s naïveté about people and their secrets and their motives. It can get her into trouble. You get into it with her, and she’s the only one who can get you out. It’s just one of the things we love about the privilege of being allowed inside your skull! Metaphorically, that is.
Q: How much research do you do before beginning to write a book? Do you go to locations, ride with police, go to see an autopsy, etc.
A: Judy’s job is her day-to-day research. As a forensic pathologist, she gets called out to death scenes, investigating deaths that are sudden, unexpected and violent. She’s done more than three thousand autopsies. She is the expert the police detectives call upon when they don’t know whether a suspicious death is an accident, a suicide or a homicide. The tasks that Jessie performs in investigating her cases are the same that Judy does in investigating hers, though Jessie has a lot less experience than Judy and is much more willing to break the rules! We do additional research by consulting and interviewing other experts in areas we don’t know about. In Aftershock, this included seasoned building contractors and construction professionals, retired police, DNA laboratory scientists, and lawyers with specific areas of specialization we can’t reveal without plot spoilers. We certainly know what we don’t know, and we’re extremely lucky to have access through collegial networks to many and sundry forensic professionals who can help us work real science into our imagined stories.
Q: What hobbies do you enjoy?
A: Judy loves to paint, craft (embroidery, sewing, jewelry-craft), and hike. T.J. is an avid bicyclist. We also love to travel and discover new foods. T.J. is the cook in the family, while Judy is the baker.
Q: Do you write under one name for all books across genres or do you have other AKA’s?
A: We write under our own names in both nonfiction (Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner) and fiction (First Cut, Aftershock). Together we also write a column called “Working Stiff” for MedPage Today, but that is published under Judy’s solo byline.
Q: Do you have pets?
A: We have a youngish mutt named Winston, a Chihuahua/wirehaired terrier mix, we think. We didn’t choose the name; he’s a rescue from Pets in Need in Redwood City, California, and came with it. T.J., who comes from a New England fishing town, figured that, like with a boat, it was bad luck to change the dog’s given name. We try to get him to model next to our books for online photos and whatnot, if he can manage to sit still long enough—which, generally, he can’t. He’s a very good boy.
Q: What’s your favorite part of writing suspense?
A: Judy’s favorite parts are going for hikes together where we work out our plot lines, our subplots, our feints and reveals. She also enjoys the serendipity of discovering things in the newspaper or on her real-life autopsy case list that can spark ideas. T.J.’s favorite part is sitting alone in a room, wrestling with commas. We both enjoy getting together after T.J. has had a full day of doing just that. Judy will read back what he has written, usually as T.J. is preparing dinner for the family, and we will make edits together along the way. We also have opposite body clocks, and T.J. will often burn the midnight oil writing so that Judy can suggest edits and revisions in the early morning, when she’s up and alert and getting ready to go to the morgue for the new day’s autopsies.
Q: Do you prefer reading and/or writing suspense with elements of romance? Why or why not?
A: Romance? Maybe. But sex—? For sure. Sex and humor, both. Noir doesn’t mean dour. We really enjoy giving Jessie a love life, or at least a sex life. That said, in our detective stories, sex can often turn into one more way for characters to lie to and manipulate one another. It also makes for great red-herring territory! Get your characters panting a little, and you can lead your readers around by the…nose. It’s tricky, but if you do it right, it can be a lot of fun. Just like—well, romance.
Q: From the books you’ve written or read, who has been your favorite villain and why?
A: A favorite villain for Judy is Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis Moriarty as written by Arthur Conan Doyle—someone who is smart and Machiavellian, not just evil or crazy. One of T.J.’s favorite villains is Pinkie in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock—though Pinkie isn’t really the villain of that book, is he? We both tend to gravitate to stories in which the killer is not necessarily the true villain, and in which that villainy isn’t straightforward or single-sided.
Q: What was your last 5 star read?
A: Judy’s latest favorite is the nonfiction Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado-Perez. It’s one of those books that makes you re-examine the world as we perceive it—and how we have built it. T.J.’s last five-star read is Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha. It’s hard to add a new great novel to the pantheon of Los Angeles noir, but she has done it magnificently.
Q: What is one thing about publishing you wish someone would have told you?
A: That it’s a sales job, and a lifetime one. You can write the best book ever, but if nobody reads it, then they will never know. You have to be just as proficient at marketing and selling your book as you have to be in crafting the plot and characters.
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Book Summary
When an earthquake strikes San Francisco, forensics expert Jessie Teska faces her biggest threat yet in this explosive new mystery from the New York Times bestselling authors of Working Stiff and First Cut.
At first glance, the death appears to be an accident. The body is located on a construction site under what looks like a collapse beam. But when Dr. Jessie Teska arrives on the scene, she notices the tell-tale signs of a staged death. The victim has been murdered. A rising star in the San Francisco forensics world, Jessie is ready to unravel the case, help bring the murderer to justice, and prevent him from potentially striking again.
But when a major earthquake strikes San Francisco right at Halloween, Jessie and the rest of the city are left reeling. And even if she emerges from the rubble, there’s no guaranteeing she’ll make it out alive.
With their trademark blend of propulsive prose, deft plotting and mordant humor, this electrifying new installment in the Jessie Teska Mystery series offers the highest stakes yet.
AFTERSHOCK (Dr. Jessie Teska Mystery Book #2) by Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell is a thrilling second book in this mystery series. I love that the intelligent and persistent Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jessie Teska can never stop questioning with just the autopsy. Even though this is the second book in the series it can easily be read as a standalone.
Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Jessie Teska gets an early morning call for a dead body that appears to be the result of a terrible construction accident. The deceased is a famous architect who appears daily on the construction site and causes problems with the workers. On further inspection at the construction site and at autopsy, Dr. Jessie Teska discovers the accident is a cover-up for a murder.
As Jessie investigates, an earthquake rocks San Francisco and derails her investigation. When she is able to look into the murder once again, an innocent man is being framed. Will Jessie be able to unearth the truth before she becomes another construction site casualty?
I love this series and protagonist! The authors bring you into medical examiners autopsy rooms and lives with writing that brings them to life on the page. Jessie is an intelligent, determined and dogged seeker of truth with a messy personal life that I love to follow and cheer on. The plot of this book throws plenty of twists and red herrings at the reader which keeps the pages turning. While I suspected the guilty individual, it was the “How” that kept me guessing. This is an excellent addition to this mystery series and I am looking forward to many more.
I highly recommend this mystery, protagonist and authors!
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Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A steel band cover of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” makes for a lousy way to lurch awake. Couple of months back, some clown of a coworker got ahold of my cell phone while I was busy in the autopsy suite, and reprogrammed the ringtone for incoming calls from the Medical Examiner Operations and Investigation Dispatch Communications Center. I keep forgetting to fix it.
I reached across my bedmate to the only table in the tiny room and managed to squelch it before the plinking got past five or six bars, but that was more than enough to wake him.
“Time is it?” Anup slurred.
“Four thirty.”
“God, Jessie,” he said, and pulled a pillow over his head. I planted a nice warm kiss on the back of his neck.
Donna Griello from the night shift was on the phone. “Good morning, Dr. Teska,” she said.
“Okay, Donna,” I whispered. “What do we got and where are we going?”
I didn’t need the GPS navigation from my one extravagance in this world, the BMW 235i that I had brought along when I moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco, because muscle memory took me there. The death scene was right on my old commute—a straight shot from the Outer Richmond District, along the edge of Golden Gate Park, then the wiggle down to SoMa, the broad, flat neighborhood south of Market Street. The blue lights were flashing on the corner of Sixth Street and Folsom, just a couple of blocks shy of the Hall of Justice. I used to perform autopsies in the bowels of the Hall, before the boss, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. James Howe, moved the whole operation to his purpose-built dream morgue, way out in Hunters Point. Along the way, Howe made me his deputy chief. The promotion came with a raise, an office, and a ficus, but I hadn’t sought it and it wasn’t welcome—I was only a year and change on the job and didn’t have the experience to be deputy chief in a big city. Howe needed someone to do it, though. So the gold badge and all its headaches went to me.
The death scene address Donna had given me over the phone was a construction site. From the outside, I couldn’t tell how big. They’d built a temporary sidewalk covered in plywood, and posted an artist’s rendition of a gleaming glass tower, crusted in niches and crenellations and funky angles, dubbed SoMa Centre.
I double-parked behind a police car and walked the plankway between a blind fence and a line of pickup trucks with union bumper stickers. The men in them eyed me with either suspicion or practiced blankness while they waited for their job site to reopen. A beat cop kept vigil at the head of the line. He took my name and badge number, logged me in, and lifted the yellow tape. He pointed to a wooden crate. It was full of construction hard hats.
“Mandatory,” he said.
“You aren’t wearing one,” I griped.
“I’m not going in there, either.”
“Good for you. Give me a light over here.”
I sorted through the helmets under the cop’s flashlight beam. Sizes large, extra large, medium. I am a woman, five feet five inches, a hundred thirty-four pounds, and not especially husky of skull. I certainly wasn’t husky enough to fill out a helmet spec’d for your average male ironworker, which seemed to be all that was on offer.
I tried out a medium. Even when I cinched the plastic headband all the way, the hard hat swallowed my sorry little blond noggin.
“Yeah, laugh it up, Officer,” I said, while he did.
“Sorry, Doc. You look like a kid playing soldier!”
“Laugh it up,” I said again, because I wasn’t equipped, at that hour, to be clever.
Not all the workers were stuck outside in their pickups. A few men in hard hats stood around, waiting for work to get going. They shied away from me, in my medical examiner windbreaker, polyester slacks, and sensible shoes, like I was the angel of death collecting on a debt.
I found Donna. She’s hard to miss: more than six feet tall, eyes and beak like a hawk. Her hard hat fit just fine. She was leaning against the medical examiner removals van with Cameron Blake, her partner 2578—our bureaucratic shorthand for death scene investigators—on the night shift. Cam is round-faced and ruddy, half a foot shorter than Donna but just as brawny. He greeted me.
“Any coffee?” I said.
“The site superintendent says it’s brewing. First shift is just getting here. That’s how come they found the body. You want to talk to him?”
“The body?”
“The superintendent.”
“Let’s find out what the dead guy has to say first.”
Donna chuckled in a dark way. “Just you wait and see, Doc.”
The pair of 2578s led me across the construction site by flashlight. Work lights were coming on, but they left big dark gaps.
“Who found the body?”
Donna consulted her clipboard. “Dispatch says a worker named Samuel Urias, opening up after the night shift.”
The construction site by flashlight was a spooky place, even by my standards. Dirty yellow machines loomed in the beams, and plastic sheeting fluttered from the shadows. Our feet crunched on gravel, then whispered over packed dirt. The only thing that was well lit was a mobile office trailer, on a rise to our left, surrounded by silhouettes in hard hats.
Donna led us toward a detached flatbed trailer, parked with its landing-gear feet pressing into the dirt. It was loaded with long metal pipes, six or eight inches in diameter, in bundles of twenty or so. The bundles were bound together with tight black bands at either end and had been stacked four high on the flatbed. One of the bands securing the top bundle had snapped. It waved drunkenly in the air—and half a dozen pipes lay tumbled in the dirt.
Underneath them was a body.
It was a man. He was on his back. His head and shoulders were crushed under the pipes. He wore a business suit and black wingtip shoes, the left one coming off at the heel. His arms were flung out. I determined his race to be white from his hands, which offered the only visible skin. They were clean and uncalloused, fingernails manicured, wedding band on the left ring finger, a college ring on the right.
I shined my flashlight at the pipes. They had done a job on him. We walked around the body, looking for a pool of blood. There wasn’t one.
When I pointed this out, Donna elbowed Cameron and smirked. He scowled back.
“What?” I said.
“I noticed that too,” Donna said. “Cam thinks it’s no big deal.”
“Can we just get this guy out of here?” Cameron said. “The superintendent is antsy. He’s worried about press, and I don’t blame him.”
I crouched to take a closer look at that left shoe. The leather above the heel was badly scuffed. Same for the right one. The dead man’s pricey wool dress pants were torn at the hems. My flashlight picked up a faint trail in the dirt running away from his feet. I warned the 2578s to watch their step until the police crime scene unit had photographed the area.
“What—?” said Cam. “CSI isn’t here. This is an accident scene.”
“Get them. This is a suspicious death.”
“Oh, come on…”
“It’s fishy.” I pointed my flashlight around. “Where’s all the blood from that crush injury? There’s drag marks and damage to the clothing to match. Soft hands, expensive suit. Where’s his hard hat?”
“Maybe it’s under the pipes.”
“Maybe. But does this guy look like he belongs on a construction site, after hours? No way I’m assuming this was an accident.”
“Told you it was staged,” Donna said to Cam.
“Whatever,” he muttered back. He pulled out his phone, said good morning to the police dispatcher, and asked for the crime scene unit.
The sky was lightening behind the downtown towers a few blocks away, and more construction workers were starting to trickle in. “We need a perimeter,” I said. “And I want to talk to the man who found the body. Do we have a presumptive ID?”
“We found this just like you see it, and didn’t run his pockets yet,” Donna said.
“Let’s wait till crime scene documents everything before we touch him.”
Donna smiled. “Because this is fishy, right?”
I couldn’t help smiling back. “You won the bet. Leave Cam alone.” I started toward the lit-up office trailer.
“Where you going?” Donna said.
“Coffee.”
A figure in the small crowd huddling at the trailer saw me coming and met me halfway. He was a late-middle-aged white man with a gray mustache, dressed like a soccer dad in blue jeans and a collared shirt. No tie, no jacket, heavy work boots. He had a fancy hard hat. It said site super.
“Where’s the hearse?” the construction superintendent demanded.
I introduced myself and told him we were waiting for the police crime scene unit to arrive and document the scene.
“How long will that take?”
Fuck if I know, I thought. “It could be a while,” I said.
“What’s a while? We have work to do here.”
Bałwan. I grew up outside of Boston, but Polish is my first language. Sort of. My mother is from Poland and my father is a son of a bitch. Mamusia taught me and my brother Tomasz the mother tongue—which Dad doesn’t speak—and the three of us stuck with it inside the four walls of our three-decker flat on Pinkham Street in East Lynn. Mamusia said it was to preserve our heritage. It was also useful for hiding things from the old man.
Polish has a lot of terms for a son of a bitch. Bałwan was Mamusia’s word for her husband Arthur Teska on a good day. If he had been drinking, he was a sukinsyn. So far, the site superintendent was turning out to be a bałwan, but the day was young.
“First the police will do their job, then my colleagues and I will do our job, and then you can get back to yours.”
“But the police are already here, and they aren’t doing anything!”
“We’re waiting for the homicide division.”
The superintendent went pale and stammery. “Homicide—? But this isn’t… This is…”
“This is a death scene. It might be a crime scene. That’s for the police to determine before I can continue my investigation as the medical examiner, and certainly before we can remove or even touch that body.”
The superintendent said nothing. He dug into his pocket for a phone and walked away, dialing. Not an unusual reaction. People freak out when they hear homicide is coming.
Judy Melinek & T.J. Mitchell are the New York Times bestselling co-authors of Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner, and the novel First Cut. Dr. Melinek studied at Harvard and UCLA, was a medical examiner in San Francisco for nine years, and today works as a forensic pathologist in Oakland and as CEO of PathologyExpert Inc. T.J. Mitchell, her husband, is a writer with an English degree from Harvard, and worked in the film industry before becoming a full-time stay-at-home dad to their children.
Today I am sharing my Feature Post and Book Review on the Partners In Crime Virtual Book Tour for THE THINGS THAT LAST FOREVER (A Vic Lenoski Mystery Book #3) by Peter W.J. Hayes. This is the first book in the series I have read and I was pulled immediately into the story. This book is easily read as a standalone.
Below you will find a book synopsis, my book review, an excerpt from the book, the author’s bio and social media links and a Rafflecopter giveaway. Good luck on the Rafflecopter giveaway and enjoy!
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Book Synopsis
After a house fire hospitalizes his partner and forces him onto medical leave, Pittsburgh Bureau of Police detective Vic Lenoski starts a desperate search for the woman who set the blaze. She is the one person who knows what happened to his missing teenage daughter, but as a fugitive, she’s disappeared so thoroughly no one can find her.
Risking his job and the wrath of the district attorney, Vic resorts to bargaining with criminal suspects for new leads, many of which point to North Dakota. He flies there, only to discover he is far from everything he knows, and his long-cherished definitions of good and bad are fading as quickly as his leads. His only chance is one last audacious roll of the dice.
Can he stay alive long enough to discover the whereabouts of his daughter and rebuild his life? Or is everything from his past lost forever?
Genre: Mystery: Police Procedural Published by: Level Best Books Publication Date: August 1, 2020 Number of Pages: 294 ISBN: 978-1-947915-56-5 Series: A Vic Lenoski Mystery; Pittsburgh Trilogy #3 || Each is a Stand Alone Mystery Purchase Links:Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Goodreads
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My Book Review
RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars
THE THINGS THAT LAST FOREVER (A Vic Lenoski Mystery Book #3) by Peter W.J. Hayes is a mystery that is the third in the series, but I had no difficulty reading it as a standalone. The story and characters pull you in immediately.
Pittsburgh Bureau of Police Detective Vic Lenoski is back. He is on medical leave after saving his partner from a burning building rather than apprehending the woman who put her there and has information on his missing daughter. She disappeared from Pittsburgh and all the info and clues he can gather lead him to North Dakota.
This mystery is full of unexpected, explosive twists that had me not only turning the pages as quickly as I could read them, but my emotions were fully engaged also. Vic has the help of old and new friends that help him through the morass of corporate and political corruption and the social issues around the native people of the Dakotas while he himself is dealing with his own moral compass. The ending was both a surprise and extremely satisfying.
I highly recommend this mystery and author.
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Excerpt
Chapter 1
Sometimes you walk into a room and what’s inside changes your life forever. That sense stopped Vic just inside the doorway. A woman with skin the color of dark amber lay on the only bed, her bandaged arms shockingly white among the shadows. She was reflected in a large window in the far wall, the outside sky as black and still as the inside of a tomb. He smelled disinfectant and blood. Numbers and graph lines flared on grey-eyed medical monitors. Somewhere in the vast empty spaces of the hospital a voice echoed.
He’d never visited a burn ward.
Never had a partner so close to death.
Never thought a room could seem as hollow as he felt inside.
The feeling was so disembodying that when he reached the bed and looked into the woman’s face, he half expected to see himself. But it was Liz, her forehead and knobby cheekbones smeared with ointment, eyebrows and eyelashes burned away. A bandage covered her left earlobe where her favorite earring, a small gold star, usually sat. It seemed like every breath she took pained her.
He wanted to take her hand but the bandages made it impossible. “Liz,” he said softly, her name almost lost among the beeps and clicks of the monitors. Liquid dripped into a tangle of IV tubes at the back of her fist.
Her eyelids fluttered.
“Liz. Doctor told me I could talk to you.”
Her eyes opened. He watched her pupils widen and narrow as they absorbed the distance to the ceiling and distinguished shadows from feeble light.
“Vic?” A hoarse whisper.
“I’m here.”
She turned her face to him. “You got me out.”
Relief rose in Vic’s throat. “Yeah. But the house didn’t make it.”
“Cora Stills?”
Vic squeezed his eyelids shut and rocked on his heels. He didn’t know where to start. Cora Stills. The one person who knew something—anything—about his missing teenage daughter. Liz on her way to arrest her. Instead, Liz, handcuffed to a radiator pipe as flames lathered and stormed through Cora’s house. Cora’s burned-out car found two days later on a crumbling stone dock next to a deserted warehouse, the Allegheny River emptying westward.
Cora, alive and moving through that tomb of darkness outside the window. Free.
“Vic…” Liz said something more but he couldn’t make it out.
He bent closer.
She forced her words from somewhere deep inside, and as she spoke, he knew this was what she saved through all the fear and pain to tell him. “Someone told Cora I was coming.”
***
Author Bio
Peter W. J. Hayes worked as a journalist, advertising copywriter and marketing executive before turning to mystery and crime writing. He is the author of the Silver Falchion-nominated Pittsburgh trilogy, a police procedural series, and is a Derringer-nominated author of more than a dozen short stories. His work has appeared in Black Cat Mystery Magazine, Mystery Weekly, Pulp Modern and various anthologies, including two Malice Domestic collections and The Best New England Crime Stories. He is also a past nominee for the Crime Writers Association (CWA) Debut Dagger Award.
Today is my turn on this Partners In Crime Book Tour. I am sharing my Feature Post and Book Review for A MURDER IS FOREVER by Rob Bates.
Below you will find a book synopsis, my book review, an excerpt from the book, the author’s bio and social media links and a Rafflecopter giveaway. Good luck on the Rafflecopter giveaway and enjoy!
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Book Synopsis
Max Rosen always said the diamond business isn’t about sorting the gems, it’s about sorting the people. His daughter Mimi is about to learn that some people, like some diamonds, can be seriously flawed.
After Mimi’s diamond-dealer cousin Yosef is murdered–seemingly for his $4 million pink diamond–Mimi finds herself in the middle of a massive conspiracy, where she doesn’t know who to trust, or what to believe. Now she must find out the truth about both the diamond and her cousin, before whoever killed Yosef, gets her.
Genre: Mystery Published by: Camel Press Publication Date: October 13th 2020 Number of Pages: 281 ISBN: 1603812229 (ISBN13: 9781603812221) Series: The Diamond District Mystery Series
A MURDER IS FOREVER (The Diamond District Mystery Series Book #1) by Rob Bates is the first book in a new amateur sleuth cozy mystery series set in New York City’s Diamond District.
Mimi Rosen is an unemployed journalist with no prospects and out of money. She reluctantly goes to work doing the books for her father’s gem company in the Diamond District of NYC.
Diamond dealing can be a dangerous profession and when Mimi’s cousin, Yosef is murdered it is assumed to be a gang related robbery, but the last 24 hours of Yosef’s life, lead Mimi to believe there is something more going on that all revolves around a large pink diamond her cousin was trying to sell.
As Mimi learns more about the diamond industry, she believes her cousin was involved in a scandal that involves bribery and murder all related to the pink diamond. Another death considered a suicide and a personal attack on Mimi’s life make Mimi more determined than ever to solve Josef’s murder no matter the consequences.
This mystery was well paced with enough twists and red herrings to keep me turning the pages and an interesting setting in NYC’s Diamond District. This book immerses the reader in the close familial diamond business and the orthodox Jewish culture in the area without slowing the pace in the mystery itself. Mimi is an interesting main character that I had mixed feeling about. On the surface, you feel sympathy for her situation, but as you read on you realize that she brought many of her personal problems on herself. As she deals with the murder, she once again is jumping into a situation she is not prepared to handle. All the secondary characters were interesting, but some seemed more caricature than realistic.
Overall, an entertaining and interesting mystery.
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Excerpt
A MURDER IS FOREVER
By Rob Bates
CHAPTER ONE
As Mimi Rosen exited the subway and looked out on the Diamond District, she remembered the words of her therapist: “This won’t last forever.”
She sure hoped so. She had been working on Forty-Seventh Street for two months and was already pretty tired of it.
To outsiders, “The Diamond District” sounded glamorous, like a street awash in glitter. To Mimi, who had spent her life around New York, Forty-Seventh Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues was a crowded, dirty eyesore of a block. The sidewalk was covered not with glitz, but with newspaper boxes, cigarettes, stacks of garbage bags, and, of course, lots of people.
Dozens of jewelry stores lined the street, all vying for attention, with red neon signs proclaiming “we buy gold” or “50 percent off.” Their windows boasted the requisite rows of glittery rings, and Mimi would sometimes see tourists ogling them, their eyes wide. She hated how the stores crammed so many gems in each display, until they all ran together like a mess of kids’ toys. For all its feints toward elegance, Forty-Seventh Street came off as the world’s sparkliest flea market.
Mimi knew the real action in the Diamond District was hidden from pedestrians, because it took place upstairs. There, in the nondescript grey and brown buildings that stood over the stores, billions in gems were bought, sold, traded, stored, cut, appraised, lost, found, and argued over. The upstairs wholesalers comprised the heart of the U.S. gem business; if someone bought a diamond anywhere in America, it had likely passed through Forty-Seventh Street.
Mimi’s father Max had spent his entire life as part of the small tight-knit diamond dealer community. It was a business based on who you knew—and even more, who you trusted. “This business isn’t about sorting the diamonds,” Max always said. “It’s about sorting the people.” Mimi would marvel how traders would seal million-dollar deals on handshakes, without a contract or lawyer in sight.
It helped that Forty-Seventh Street was comprised mostly of family businesses, owned by people from a narrow range of ethnic groups. Most—like Mimi’s father—were Orthodox, or religious, Jews. (“We’re the only people crazy enough to be in this industry,” as Max put it.) The Street was also home to a considerable contingent of Hasidic Jews, who were even more religious and identifiable by their black top hats and long flowing overcoats. Mimi once joked that Forty-Seventh Street was so diverse, it ran the gamut from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox.
Now Mimi, while decidedly secular, was part of it all. Working for her father’s diamond company was not something she wanted to do, not something she ever dreamed she would do. Yet, here she was.
She had little choice. She had not worked full-time since being laid off from her editing job a year ago. She was already in debt from her divorce, which had cost more than her wedding, and netted little alimony. “That’s what happens when you divorce a lawyer,” said her shrink.
Six months after she lost her job, Mimi first asked her father for money. He happily leant it to her, though he added he wasn’t exactly Rockefeller. It was after her third request—accompanied, like the others, by heartfelt vows to pay him back—that he asked her to be the bookkeeper at his company. “I know you hate borrowing from me,” he told her. “This way, it isn’t charity. Besides, it’ll be nice having you around.”
Mimi protested she could barely keep track of her own finances. Her father reminded her that she got an A in accounting in high school. Which apparently qualified her to do the books at Max Rosen Diamond Company.
“We have new software, it makes it easy,” Max said. “Your mother, may she rest in peace, did it for years.”
Mimi put him off. She had a profession, and it wasn’t her mother’s.
Mimi was a journalist. She had worked at a newspaper for nine years, and a website for five. She was addicted to the thrill of the chase, the pump of adrenaline when she uncovered a hot story or piece of previously hidden info. There is no better sound to a reporter’s ears than someone sputtering, “How did you find that out?”
“It’s the perfect job for you,” her father once said. “You’re a professional nosy person.”
She loved journalism for a deeper reason, which she rarely admitted to her cynical reporter friends: She wanted to make a difference. As a girl, she was haunted by the stories they told in religious school, how Jews were killed in concentration camps while the world turned its head. Growing up, she devoured All the President’s Men and idolized pioneering female muckrakers like Nellie Bly.
Being a journalist was the only thing Mimi ever wanted to do, the only thing she knew how to do. She longed to do it again.
Which is why, she told her therapist, she would tell her father no.
Dr. Asner said she understood, in that soft melancholy coo common to all therapists. Then she crept forward on her chair.
“Maybe you should take your father up on this. He’s really throwing you a lifeline. You keep telling me how bad the editorial job market is.” She squinted and her glasses inched up her nose. “Sometimes people adjust their dreams. Put them on hold.”
Mimi felt the blood drain from her face. In her darker moments—and she had quite a few after her layoff—she had considered leaving journalism and doing something else, though she had no idea what that would be. Mimi always believed that giving up her lifelong passion would be tantamount to surrender.
Dr. Asner must have sensed her reaction, because she quickly backtracked.
“You can continue to look for a journalism job,” she said. “Who knows? Maybe working in the Diamond District will give you something to write about. Besides,”— here, her voice gained an edge—“you need the money.” That was driven home at the end of the forty-five minutes, when Dr. Asner announced that she couldn’t see Mimi for any more sessions, since Mimi hadn’t paid her for the last three.
By that point, Mimi didn’t know whether to argue, burst into tears, or wave a white flag and admit the world had won.
It was a cold February morning as Mimi walked down Forty-Seventh Street to her father’s office, following an hour-plus commute from New Jersey that included a car, a bus, and a subway. With her piercing hazel eyes, glossy brown hair, and closely set features, Mimi was frequently told she was pretty, though she never quite believed it. She had just gotten her hair cut short to commemorate her thirty-eighth birthday, hoping for a more “mature” look. She had always been self-conscious about her height; she was five foot four and tried to walk taller. She was wearing a navy dress that she’d snagged for a good price on eBay; it was professional enough to please her father, who wanted everyone to look nice in the office, without being so nice that she was wasting one of her few good outfits. She was bundled up with multiple layers and a heavy coat—to protect against the winter chill, as well as the madness around her.
Even though it was before 9 AM, Forty-Seventh Street was, as usual, packed, and Mimi gritted her teeth as she bobbed and weaved through the endless crowd. She sidestepped the store workers grabbing a smoke, covering her mouth so she wouldn’t get cancer. She swerved around the stern-looking guard unloading the armored car, with the gun conspicuously dangling from his belt. And she dodged the “hawker” trying to lure her into a jewelry store, who every day asked if she had gold to sell, even though every day she told him no.
Finally, Mimi reached her father’s building, 460 Fifth, the most popular address on “The Street.” After a few minutes standing and tapping her foot on the security line, she handed her driver’s license to the security guard and called out, “Rosen Diamonds.”
“Miss,” growled the guard with the oversized forehead who’d seen her three days a week for the past two months, “you should get a building ID. It’ll save you time in the morning.”
“It’s okay. I won’t be working here for long,” she chirped, though she wasn’t quite sure of that.
Next stop, the elevator bank. Mimi had an irrational fear of elevators; she was always worried she would die in one. She particularly hated these elevators, which were extremely narrow and perpetually packed. She envied those for whom a subway was their sole exposure to a cramped unpleasant space.
As the car rose, one occupant asked a Hasidic dealer how he was finding things.
“All you can do is put on your shoes. The rest is up to the man upstairs.”
Only in the diamond business. Mimi’s last job was thirty blocks away, yet in a different universe.
At each floor, dealers pushed and rushed like they were escaping a fire. When the elevator reached her floor, Mimi too elbowed her way to freedom.
As she walked to her father’s office, she marveled how the building, so fancy and impressive when she was a kid, had sunk into disrepair. The carpets were frayed, the paint was peeling, and the bathroom rarely contained more than one functioning toilet. If management properly maintained the building, they’d charge Midtown Manhattan rents, which small dealers like her father couldn’t afford. The neglect suited everyone.
She spied a new handwritten sign, “No large minyans, by order of the fire department.” Mimi produced a deep sigh. She had long ago left her religious background behind. Somehow, she was now working in a building where they warn against praying in the halls. She was going backward.
Perhaps the dealer in the elevator was right. You could only put on your shoes and do your best. She grabbed her pocketbook strap, threw her head back, and was just about at her father’s office when she heard the yelling.
“I’m so tired of waiting, Yosef! It’s not fair!”
Max’s receptionist, Channah, was arguing with her boyfriend, Yosef, a small-time, perpetually unsuccessfully diamond dealer. Making it more awkward: Yosef was Mimi’s cousin.
Channah and Yosef had dated for nearly eighteen months without getting married—an eternity in Channah’s community. Still, whenever Channah complained, Mimi remembered how her ex-husband only popped the question after three years and two ultimatums.
“Give me more time,” Yosef stuttered, as he tended to do when nervous. “I want to be successful in the business.”
“When’s that going to happen? The year three thousand?”
The argument shifted to Yiddish, which Mimi didn’t understand, though they were yelling so fiercely she didn’t need to. Finally, tall, skinny Yosef stormed out of the office, his black hat and suit set off by his red face. He was walking so fast he didn’t notice his cousin Mimi standing against the wall. Given the circumstances, she didn’t stop him to say hello. She watched his back grow smaller as he stomped and grunted down the hall.
Mimi gave Channah time to cool down. After a minute checking in vain for responses to her latest freelance pitch—editors weren’t even bothering to reject her anymore—she rang the doorbell. She flashed a half-smile at the security camera stationed over the door, and Channah buzzed her in. Mimi hopped into the “man trap,” the small square space between security doors that was a standard feature of diamond offices. She let the first door slam behind her, heard the second buzz, pulled the metal handle on the inner door, and said hello to Channah, perched at her standard spot at the reception desk.
Channah had long dark curly hair, which she constantly twirled; a round, expressive face, dotted with black freckles; and a voluptuous figure that even her modest religious clothing couldn’t hide.
“Did you hear us argue?” she asked Mimi.
“No,” she sputtered. “I mean—”
Channah smiled and pointed to the video monitor on her desk. “I could see you on the camera.” Her shoulders slouched. “It was the same stupid argument we always have. Even I’m bored by it.”
“Hang in there. We’ll talk at lunch.” Mimi and Channah shared a quick hug, and Mimi walked back to the office.
She was greeted by her father’s smile and a peck on the cheek. If anything made this job worthwhile, it was that grin. Plus the money.
“How are things this morning?”
“Baruch Hashem,” Max replied. Max said “thank God” all the time, even during his wife’s sickness, when he really didn’t seem all that thankful.
Sure enough, he added, “We’re having a crisis.”
Mimi almost rolled her eyes. It was always a crisis in the office. When Mimi was young, the family joke was that business was either “terrible” or “worse than terrible.”
Lately, her dad seemed more agitated than normal. As he spoke, he puttered in a circle and his hands clutched a pack of Tums. That usually didn’t come out until noon.
“I can’t find the two-carat pear shape.” He threw his arms up and his forehead exploded into a sea of worry lines. “It’s not here, it’s not there. It’s nowhere.”
Max Rosen was dressed, as usual, in a white button-down shirt and brown wool slacks, with a jeweler’s loupe dangling on a rope from his neck. His glasses sat off-kilter on his nose, and two shocks of white hair jutted from his skull like wings. When he was excited about something, like this missing diamond, the veins in his neck popped and the bobby-pinned yarmulke seemed to flap on his head.
Mimi stifled a laugh. That was the crisis? Diamonds always got lost in the office. As kids, Mimi and her two sisters used to come in on weekends and be paid one dollar for every stone they found on the floor. “They travel,” Max would say.
It was no surprise that things went missing in that vortex of an office. Every desk was submerged under a huge stack of books, magazines, and papers. The most pressing were placed on the seat near her father’s desk, what he called his “in-chair.”
When Mimi’s mother worked there, she kept a lid on the chaos. After her death, Max hired a few bookkeepers, none of whom lasted; two years later, the job had somehow fallen to Mimi.
Eventually, Channah found the two-carat pear shape, snug in its parcel papers, right next to the bathroom keys. The only logical explanation was that Max was examining it while on the toilet.
Max sheepishly returned to his desk. Mimi loved watching her father at work. She was fascinated by how he joked with friends, took grief from clients, and kept track of five things at once. It felt exotic and forbidden, like observing an animal in its natural habitat.
For the most part, they got along, which was no small thing. Over the years, there had been tense moments as he struggled to accept that she was no longer religious. Lately, he rarely brought the topic up, and she didn’t want him to. Her split from her non-Jewish ex probably helped.
On occasion, the old strains resurfaced, in subtle ways. Max’s desk was covered with photos—mostly of Mimi’s mom and her religious sisters and their religious broods. One time when Max was at lunch, Mimi tiptoed over to glance at them, and—not incidentally—check how many were of her. It made her feel silly, yet she couldn’t help herself. She was a professional nosy person.
She got her answer: out of about twenty photos, Mimi was in three, an old family photo and two pics from her sisters’ weddings. That was less than expected. She tried not to take it personally. She had no kids and her marriage was a bust. What was there to show off?
Mimi spent most of the morning deciphering her father’s books—a task made more difficult by his aging computer system, which regularly stalled and crashed. Her father’s “new” software was actually fifteen years old.
Sometimes she wished he gave her more substantial tasks to do. While her father would never say it, he didn’t consider the diamond industry a place for women, as it had always been male-dominated—even though, ironically, it catered mostly to females. That was fine with Mimi. She didn’t want to devote her life to a rock.
At 1 PM, Channah and Mimi headed for Kosher Gourmet, their usual lunch spot. Mimi always joked, “I don’t know if it’s kosher, but it’s not gourmet.”
In the two months Mimi had worked for her father, she and Channah had become fast friends, bonding over their shared love of mystery novels, crossword puzzles, and sarcastic senses of humor.
Channah was not Mimi’s typical friend. She was twenty-three and her parents were strictly religious, even more than Mimi’s. She commuted to Forty-Seventh Street every day on a charter bus from Borough Park, a frum enclave in Brooklyn. The Diamond District was her main exposure to the wider world. She reminded Mimi of her younger, more religious self, under her parents’ thrall yet curious what else was out there.
Mimi was not Channah’s typical friend either. During their lunches, Channah quizzed her on the taste of non-Kosher food (it didn’t taste any different, Mimi told her); sex (“When the time comes,” Mimi said, “you’ll figure it out”); and popular culture (“Can you explain,” Channah once asked, “why Kim Kardashian is famous?” Mimi just said no.) Today, as usual, they talked about Yosef.
“I don’t get it.” Channah wrapped sesame noodles around her white plastic fork. “I love him. He loves me. Why not get married?”
Mimi took a sip from her Styrofoam cup filled with warm tap water. She preferred bottled water but couldn’t afford it. “Have you thought of giving Yosef an ultimatum? Tell him if he doesn’t marry you by a certain date, that’s it.”
“Yosef wouldn’t take that seriously.” Channah turned her eyes to her tray.
“Why not?”
“Cause I’ve done that already. Three times! I backed down every time.” Her fork toyed with her food. “I believe it is beshert that Yosef and I will end up together. I’ve thought so since I first met him at your father’s office, and he smiled at me. What choice do I have?” Her elbow nudged her tray across the table.
“I understand why he’s waiting. He wants to be a steady provider. That’s a good thing, right?”
Actually, Mimi found it sexist. She didn’t say that, because she found many things in Channah’s world sexist.
“He just needs to sell that pink,” Channah said, spearing a dark brown cube of chicken.
Mimi took a quick sip of water. “That pink” was an awkward subject.
One month ago, Yosef had bought a three-point-two carat pink diamond. It was the biggest purchase of his career, the kind of high-risk move that could make or break his business. Max was overjoyed. “Do you know how rare pink diamonds are?” he exclaimed. “And it’s a three-carater! Sounds like a great buy!”
That was, until Yosef proudly presented it to his uncle Max, who inspected it under his favorite lamp, muttered “very nice,” and quickly handed it back.
It was only after Yosef left that Max dismissed his nephew’s score as a strop, a dog of a diamond, the kind of unsellable item that gathered dust in a safe.
“It has so many pepper spots,” Max lamented. “The color’s not strong at all. No one will buy that thing.”
“Maybe he got it for a good price,” Mimi said.
“I’m sure whoever sold it to him said it was the bargain of the century. Anytime someone offers me a metziah, that’s a sign they can’t sell the stone. There’s a saying, ‘your metziah is my strop.’” His face sagged. “I wish he talked to me first. That stone is worthless. I don’t have the heart to tell him.”
When Channah brought up the big pink at lunch, Mimi didn’t want to dwell on the subject. “What’s happening with that?” she asked, as casually as possible.
“Didn’t you hear?” Channah jerked forward. “It got the highest grade possible on its USGR cert.”
“You’ll have to translate.” Mimi tuned out most diamond talk.
“Cert is short for certificate, meaning grading report. The USGR is the U.S. Academy for Gemological Research, the best lab in the industry.”
Mimi just stared.
“That stone’s worth four million dollars.”
That Mimi understood. “Wow.” A lot of money for a dog of a diamond.
“Four point one million, to be exact.” Channah laughed. “Don’t want to leave that point one out!”
“I thought that stone was—”
“Ugly?” Channah chuckled. “Me too! I don’t understand how it got that grade. I guess it doesn’t matter. As your father says, ‘today the paper is worth more than the diamond.’” She slurped some diet soda.
“Is Yosef going to get four million dollars?”
“Who knows? He isn’t exactly an expert in selling such a stone. Your father convinced him to post it on one of the online trading networks. Someone called him about it yesterday.”
“That’s great!”
“Hopefully. If anyone could screw this up, Yosef could.” Channah’s mouth curled downward. “I keep checking my phone to see if there’s any news.” She flipped over her iPhone, saw nothing, and flipped it back. “The way I figure, if he sells that stone, he’ll have to marry me. Unless he comes up with some new excuse. He wouldn’t do that, right? Not after all this time. Would he?”
Mimi struggled to keep herself in check. She was dying to shake Channah and scream that if Yosef wasn’t giving her what she wanted, it was time to move on. She didn’t. Yosef was her cousin. Mimi was in no position to critique someone else’s love life. She always told people hers was “on hold.” It was basically non-existent.
Plus, she remembered how, weeks before her wedding, her friends warned her that her fiancé had a wandering eye. That just strengthened her resolve to marry him, even though in retrospect, they were right. “With situations like that,” her therapist said later, “I always recommend not to say anything. Just be a supportive friend.”
Mimi waited until Channah stopped speaking. She touched her hand. “I’m sure it will work out,” she said.
***
Author Bio
Rob Bates has written about the diamond industry for over 25 years. He is currently the news director of JCK, the leading publication in the jewelry industry, which just celebrated its 150th anniversary. He has won 12 editorial awards, and been quoted as an industry authority in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and on National Public Radio.
He is also a comedy writer and performer, whose work has appeared on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update segment, comedycentral.com, and McSweeneys He has also written for Time Out New York, New York Newsday, and Fastcompany.com. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and son.
