This series is the junk food of murder mysteries. 😀

11th Hour	(2012)	Description / Buy at Amazon.ca
12th of Never	(2013)	Description / Buy at Amazon.ca
Unlucky 13	(2014)	Description / Buy at Amazon.ca
14th Deadly Sin	(2015)	Description / Buy at Amazon.ca

11th Hour

Not bad. I enjoyed this one.

Lindsay Boxer is pregnant at last! … But her work doesn’t slow for a second. 

Lindsay is called next to the most bizarre crime scene she’s ever seen: two bodiless heads elaborately displayed in the garden of a world-famous actor. Another head is unearthed in the garden, and Lindsay realizes that the ground could hide hundreds of victims.

12th of Never

Lindsay Boxer’s beautiful baby is born … but it’s a drama.

A rising star football player for the San Francisco 49ers is the prime suspect in a grisly murder. At the same time, Lindsay is confronted with the strangest story she’s ever heard: An eccentric English professor has been having vivid nightmares about a violent murder and he’s convinced is real. Lindsay doesn’t believe him, but then a shooting is called in-and it fits the professor’s description to the last detail.

Unlucky 13

Mackie Morales is back. The most deranged and dangerous killer the Women’s Murder Club has ever encountered.

San Francisco Detective Lindsay Boxer is loving her life as a new mother. With an attentive husband, a job she loves, plus best friends who can talk about anything from sex to murder, things couldn’t be better.

Then the FBI sends Lindsay a photo of a killer from her past, and her happy world is shattered. The picture captures a beautiful woman at a stoplight. But all Lindsay sees is the psychopath behind those seductive eyes: Mackie Morales …

14th Deadly Sin

Quite good.

With a beautiful baby daughter and a devoted husband, Detective Lindsay Boxer can safely say that her life has never been better. In fact (for a change), things seem to be going well for all the members of the Women’s Murder Club …

The 5th book (2004) in the Lucas Davenport series is one of the author’s favourites.

Davenport meets his future wife in this one.

It is winter in the remote, dark Wisconsin woods.

But the chill in the local sheriff’s bones has nothing to do with the weather.

The extravagance of the crime is new to him: the murdered man, woman and child; the machete-like knife through the man’s head; the ashes of the fire-consumed house spread over the ice and snow.

In desperation, the sheriff turns for help to the reclusive lawman he’d heard had a cabin up here, and with reluctance Davenport agrees, but it is a decision he will soon have reason to regret.

For this is a kind of criminal new to him, too.

Authorities make a lot of stupid decisions. Disappointing.

Excellent.

Original.

Funny and entertaining.

A coming of age, murder mystery, ghost story.

If you told me this was written by Stephen King, I’d believe you. As with many King novels, it’s long. Perhaps too long.

The Weller is one of my favourite characters of fiction. A football / weight room jock, he’s the unlikely friend of our protagonist.

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Thrilled to find a new author I really admired … I was half way through the book before discovering Scott Carson is a pen name for one of my favourite writers — Michael Koryta.

His 2024 book is a ‘Love Letter’ to Bloomington, Indiana. The author was born and raised there.

This novel is set in 1999.

When a young woman disappears in his small town, the investigation hinges on 16-year-old Marshall Miller’s haunted sighting of her, crying in the back seat of a police car driven by a cop named Maddox.

There’s only one problem: no local cop named Maddox exists.

But the speeding ticket he handed to Marshall certainly does.

Dealing with police and media is heady stuff for a teenager, the son of a single mother, but Marshall is sure he can handle it, until the shocking day when his reliability as a witness implodes.

Now scorned and shamed, he finds unlikely allies as he confronts the ancient secrets behind his small town’s peaceful façade—and learns the truth about his own family.

Amazon

I was quite intrigued with the start of this book. But when she didn’t report rape. And didn’t defend herself in front of the tribunal effectively … I got pissed off. Quit at 43%.

Let’s say you want to write a murder mystery. …

You need some kind of unique hook.

This 2024 novel is unique and fascinating.

Profane, motorcycle riding, smoking, tattooed, pierced, anti-social and damaged …

… Maggie Moore is a surprising genius when it comes to words, a savant able to solve any linguistic puzzle.

The top student in her forensic linguistics class, she’s tapped by local police to use her skills to decipher harrowing notes left by a stalker-turned-rapist—and succeeds brilliantly.

But when the daughter of a local mayor is abducted, Maggie isn’t sure she’s the right person to help the police solve the crime. Given what happened to her best childhood friend, Maggie just might be too close to this one.

Yet she knows the authorities in this rural south-Central Florida town cannot crack the case without her special skill.

Along with her new best friend, a detective Jackson, Maggie begins to analyze the texts, emails, and verbal tics of various suspects . . . and comes to a disturbing conclusion …

Amazon

The story of how this book came to be is fascinating, however.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

“Listen for the Lie,” (2024) … Stephen King called “a world-class whodunit” …

It’s a comedy, as well. Laughs on every page.

It follows Lucy Chase, a woman believed to have killed her best friend years prior.

Lucy, who has amnesia about the entire incident, was never officially charged or arrested for the murder, though it is generally believed that she did it.

When Ben Owens, a true crime podcaster, digs up the cold case again for his podcast five years later, Lucy joins in helping him uncover who the true killer is.

The book explores the themes of The Gap Between Perception and Reality, The Misogynistic Dismissal of Survivors, and The Effects of Physical and Psychological Trauma.

SuperSummary

Almost everyone loves this book. For me it started to DRAGGGGG about half way through.

Still … I hung in to find out the killer. I’d guessed wrong. 😀

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

This post is about the 2019 book, not the acclaimed TV series on which it is based.

Prime Suspect is a British police procedural television series (1991 – 2006) devised by Lynda La Plante. It stars Helen Mirren as Jane Tennison, one of the first female Detective Chief Inspectors in Greater London‘s Metropolitan Police Service, who rises to the rank of Detective Superintendent while confronting institutionalised sexism within the police force.

… voted 68th in the list of 100 Greatest British Television Programmes as compiled by a poll given by the British Film Institute, and in 2007 it was listed as one of Time magazine’s “100 Best TV Shows of All-TIME.”

Prime Suspect — the book — was published by Lynda La Plante in 2019, long after the end of the TV series.

Not nearly as good.

I found DCI Jane Tennison mostly annoying.

The pace too slow.

Not recommended.

When a prostitute is found murdered in her bedsit, the Metropolitan police set to work finding the perpetrator of this brutal attack. DNA samples lead them straight to known criminal George Marlow. The police think they’ve found their man, but things are not quite what they seem….

Desperate to remove all doubt around her suspect, Tennison struggles to make the charges stick. And then a second body turns up.

With the team against her, DCI Jane Tennison is in a race against time to catch a dangerous criminal ­- and prove she’s just as tough as any man.

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A glutton for punishment, I next read Prime Suspect 3 – Silent Victims (2019).

Better — but I still wanted to push Jane Tennison into the river.

When a body is found in one of London’s poorest districts, the coroner’s report identifies the victim as young, black and female, but impossibly anonymous. 

One thing is clear to Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison about this victim – that news of her murder will tear apart a city already cracking with racial tensions, hurling Scotland Yard and Tennison herself into a maelstrom of shocking accusations and sudden, wrenching violence. 

As London’s brutal killer remains at large, Tennison is locked in a struggle to overcome her station house’s brutal chauvinism and insidious politicking. And as the department’s deeply rooted racism rears its head and threatens to overshadow every facet of her new investigation, the trail of her prime suspect is growing colder. 

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I didn’t get very far into Prime Suspect 2 – A Face in the Crowd.

Somehow I got hooked on the Women’s Murder Club books.

2nd Chance (2002)

Dumb. It’s exactly this kind of lazy plotting that makes me call these the junk food of murder mystery.

The bad guy is trapped in a tower. SWAT is on the way. EVERYONE would concur that you sit and wait for the experts.

But not Lindsey. She decides to rush up the stairs alone.

Dumb.

3rd Degree (2004)

Pretty good. Lindsey gets with Joe for the first time.

4th of July (2005)

Lindsay shot and killed a young girl. Paralyzed her brother. The court case was fascinating.

The murder out in Half Moon Bay as unbelievable as any plot in the series.

The 5th Horseman (2006)

One of the better books in the series, I’d say.

The 6th Target (2007)

Good.

Interesting court case — was the killer legally insane?

Wicked Prey is 19th in the Lucas Davenport “Prey” series. 

Another good read.

The Republicans are coming to St. Paul for their convention. John McCain will be getting the nomination.

Throwing a big party is supposed to be fun, but crashing the party are a few hard cases the police would rather stayed away.

Chief among them is a crew of professional stick-up men who’ve spotted several lucrative opportunities, ranging from political moneymen with briefcases full of cash, to that convention hotel with the weakness in its security system. …

And then there’s the young man with the .50-caliber sniper rifle and the right-wing-crazy background, roaming through a city filled with the most powerful politicians on earth…