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.
Today is my turn on this new Books n All Promotions Book Tour. I am sharing my Feature Post and Book Review for AUSTRALIA (A DS Jason Smith Thriller Book #14) by Stewart Giles.
Below you will find a book blurb, my book review, an excerpt from the book and the author’s bio and social media links. Enjoy!
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Book Blurb
Detective Jason Smith is sick and tired of the English weather. It’s February in York and the dark, dreary days are getting him down.
When his wife, DC Erica Whitton wins a holiday to Australia, Smith is reluctant to go. He has no desire to go back home. Against his better judgement, Smith agrees to show his wife and daughter where he grew up.
The perfect holiday soon turns into a nightmare as Smith finds himself in a race against time to save the only people he’s ever cared about.
Children in Smith’s home town are being murdered. There’s something rotten there, an evil Smith has never come across before, and the local police are not what they appear to be.
When his wife is attacked and his daughter is taken, Smith realises he’s on his own. With the clock ticking, and not knowing if his daughter is alive or dead, Smith comes face to face with the worst kind of evil he’s ever encountered.
DS JASON SMITH SERIES Book 0.5-Phobia Book 1-Smith Book 2-Boomerang Book 3-Ladybird Book 4-Occam’s Razor Book 5-Harlequin Book 6-Selene Book 7-Horsemen Book 8-Unworthy Book 9 – Venom Book 10 – Severed Book 11 – Demons Book 12 – Deadeye Book 13 – Motive Book 14 – Australia
DI O’REILLY MYSTERIES Blood on the Island Lies on the Island
Fear on the Island (coming February 2021)
DC HARRIET TAYLOR SERIES Book 1-The Beekeeper Book 2-The Perfect Murder Book 3-The Backpacker Trotterdown a box set of DC Harriet Taylor books 1-3
DS JASON SMITH &DC HARRIET TAYLOR SERIES Book 1 – The Enigma Book 2 – Dropzone Book 3 – The Raven Girl Trilogy: The DS Smith & Harriet Taylor box set
PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLERS Miranda Mistress Medusa
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My Book Review
RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars
AUSTRALIA (A DS Jason Smith Thriller Book #14) by Stewart Giles is the latest DS Jason Smith crime thriller. It is an intense race against the clock, edge-of-your-seat emotional thrill ride from start to finish. Even though this is the fourteenth outing for Smith, this book is easily read as a standalone.
DS Jason Smith, his wife, DC Erica Whitton and their five-year-old daughter, Laura are ready to take a vacation from the dreary York February weather. Erica wins a three-week vacation to Australia, but Smith is not happy about returning to his hometown.
When they arrive, they find there are reports of several missing children and some have turned up dead. While at the beach, Erica is stabbed and nearly killed while Laura has disappeared. Smith discovers that not only have the police little to go on, but there seems to be obstruction from above in the local police force hindering any true investigation.
DS Bridge comes to Australia to cover Smith’s back and help recover his daughter. Will Smith and Bridge be able to uncover who has been abducting the missing children and save Laura before she becomes a victim, too?
WOW! This is my first DS Jason Smith thriller and it will not be my last. The plot is a fast-paced, step-by-step emotional punch to the gut. Smith has to stay unemotional and work the crime all while being obstructed by the local chief of police, deal with his wife almost being killed and his daughter being abducted and not knowing if she is dead or alive. The killers are truly evil and terrifying.
I highly recommend this crime thriller! I could not put it down. I felt an immediate connection with the characters and I believe there will be a Jason Smith thrillers reading marathon coming soon.
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Author Bio
After reading English at 3 Universities and graduating from none of them, I set off travelling around the world with my wife, Ann, finally settling in South Africa, where we still live.
In 2014 Ann dropped a rather large speaker on my head and I came up with the idea for a detective series. DS Jason Smith was born. Smith, the first in the series was finished a few months later.
3 years and 8 DS Smith books later, Joffe Books wondered if I would be interested in working with them. As a self-published author, I agreed. However, we decided on a new series – the DC Harriet Taylor: Cornwall series.
The Beekeeper was published and soon hit the number one spot in Australia. The second in the series, The Perfect Murder did just as well.
I continued to self-publish the Smith series and Unworthy hit the shelves in 2018 with amazing results. I therefore made the decision to self-publish The Backpacker which is book 3 in the Detective Harriet Taylor series which was published in July 2018.
After The Backpacker I had an idea for a totally new start to a series – a collaboration between the Smith and Harriet thrillers and The Enigma was born. It brings together the broody, enigmatic Jason Smith and the more level-headed Harriet Taylor.
The Miranda trilogy is something totally different. A psychological thriller trilogy. It is a real departure from anything else I’ve written before.
The Detective Jason Smith series continues to grow and there are now 14 books including the introduction: Phobia.
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.”
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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.
