2017 cosy mystery, first in the Morgan Dane series. Morgan, widowed
with three small daughters, is getting back into her career as an ADA;
but when the daughters' former babysitter is murdered and the
neighbour kid is accused, she offers to defend him.
This is a short book but can still get painfully slow in places.
On the one hand there's investigation behind the backs of a grossly
incompetent police department, and of course everyone looks a bit
suspicious, but the eventual culprit won't be surprising to an
experienced mystery reader. On the other hand there's Morgan's slow
romance with the private investigator Lance Kruger (does that sound as
craftedly macho a name to an American reader as it does to me?), and
obviously what women really want is, well:
Despite her protests, and against her entire modern, professional
woman image, she enjoyed the way he made her feel small and
feminine. All those muscles weren't just for show.
And I'd have liked it better if that had been mentioned once or twice
rather than hammered in repeatedly. There are lots of mysterious
secrets for both of them, presumably to be expanded on in later books.
And wonder of wonders, here's a book by an American set in a small
town which doesn't have as implicit assumption the idea that
small-town living is the Best Thing Ever; there are small-minded
neighbours who are happy to turn on the obvious suspect to the point
of trying to deny him a defence.
The writing is mostly pedestrian, but there's the occasional spark
that kept me interested in these people, and I'll probably come back
to this series eventually – though it definitely falls into the
"fluff" class.
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