A Deadly Thaw by Sarah Ward

A Deadly Thaw is the second novel in the DC Connie Childs series by Sarah Ward. I reviewed the first book, In Bitter Chill, a couple weeks ago. The third book, A Patient Fury, will be released in September. Thus far each book revolves around a present day mystery that connects to a previously unsolved crime in the distant (or not too distant) past and Childs and/or DI Sadler twinge on to the sense that they're 'missing something' in the case file, such as some key piece of evidence, that will make all the puzzle pieces fall into place. Both In Bitter Chill and A Deadly Thaw exposed a dark and depraved secret that essentially broke the case wide open for the detectives.

In 2004 Lena Grey was convicted of and served time for the murder of her husband, Andrew Miller, having suffocated the man in the couple's marital bed. Now over a decade later the newly dead body of Andrew Miller turns up in Hale's End, a local, long abandoned mortuary, having been shot dead barely a day earlier. Where was Andrew in the intervening decade? Who was the man Lena killed so many years ago? And why did she lie about the man's identity?

Before DC Childs, DS Palmer, and DI Sadler can further question Lena, she disappears without a trace in the middle of the night from the home she shares with her sister Kat, a therapist. Though the sisters are roommates, they are essentially estranged due to the distance Lena maintains from most people in her life. However, the distance opened up practically over night when the girls were teenagers and predicated behavioral changes as well as an utter change in course for Lena's life. Is Lena's disappearance voluntary? Or was she taken by force? What precipitated the sisters' estrangement and Lena's behavioral changes?

Soon after Lena's disappearance, another woman named Stephanie Alton turns up drowned in the nearby river. Though an apparent suicide, the proximity to both Andrew's murder and Lena's subsequent disappearance gives Alton's death the appearance of being more than mere coincidence. Some digging uncovers that Stephanie was friends with Lena many years ago and that Stephanie is connected to Philip Staley, the probable candidate for the dead man in Lena's marital bed and the man Stephanie maintained ruined her life. The police then connect the dots between Stephanie's death, the murdered men, and events during Lena's teenage years during which Lena suffered a trauma that altered her life and her relationship with her sister.

Meanwhile, there's some internal investigation shadiness going on with DCI Llewellyn that also connects to this case as well as past cases of grossly mishandled sexual assaults. However, Llewellyn's prohibition from reading Sadler, Childs, and Palmer in on the internal investigation hinders the timely connections between the current murders and how they connect to the epidemic of sexual assaults.

A thought I had:

Palmer and his marital woes (following on the heels of his pre-wedding jitters/cold feet in the previous novel) get old, sketchy, and irritating real quick. Palmer is "traditional" and "will never leave his wife." Fine. Leave aside the fact that he had red flags from this broad before the wedding that should have precluded him from going through with the marriage, one can clearly see that this situation is on a slow burn that will eventually blow up (probably in everyone's faces). If it takes Palmer's career down with it and that means we never see Palmer again, fine, and good riddance. The man made his bed, now he needs to lay in it and deal with it.

--Reviewed by Ms. Angie

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I've Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

I feel as if I could write a book subtitled "What I've Learned From Reading Too Much" except all my lessons would be culled from Greek mythology, the Babysitters' Club, the lives of British queens, crime mysteries, suspense thrillers and celebrity and entertainment gossip. I first ran across How To Be A Heroine by Samantha Ellis in an ad in BookPage. The title sounded intriguing and once I looked it up on Amazon, I was in for reading it. It reminds me of the literacy autobiography writing assignment that I had in one of my English composition classes in college--except this is the literacy autobiography on steroids. The premise of this book is that the author revisits the seminal texts that she read in her youth by examining the lessons and impressions of the novels that she had upon her first readings when she was younger. Ellis has then re-read the novels as an adult specifically for the writing of her own book to see if the novels hold up to her original i

Heat Lightning by John Sandford

I'd previously read John Sandford's first Virgil Flowers novel, Dark of the Moon , a few years back and found it to be a quick, well written read. Recently I discovered he has since written three more Flowers titles and decided to start with the second title and read through to the fourth and most recent one. Heat Lightning is the second Flowers installment. The darkness of the crimes committed that must be solved in the novel are leavened by the lighter presentation of Flowers and the story. It works well together--a dark crime doesn't always need dark prose to back it up. Virgil Flowers is Lucas Davenport's go to man in the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension when there's a sensitive, tough or otherwise puzzling case to solve. Flowers has a high clearance rate and can often turn around a case in about a week. This particular case is especially perplexing with quite a few red herrings thrown into the mix to throw everyone--Flowers and the reader in

The Whisperers by John Connolly

If there was one thing Jimmy didn't care for, it was competition, ... There were some exceptions to that rule: he was rumored to have a sweet deal with the Mexicans, but he wasn't about to try to reason with the Dominicans, or the Columbians, or the bikers, or even the Mohawks. If they wanted to avail themselves of his services, as they sometimes did, that was fine, but if Jimmy Jewel started questioning their right to move product he and Earle would end up tied to chairs in the [bar] with pieces of themselves scattered by their feet, assuming their feet weren't among the scattered pieces, while the bar burned down around their ears, assuming they still had ears. from page 86 The Whisperers is John Connolly's newest Charlie Parker installment in which some beloved characters reappear and in which previous characters from another Parker installment reappear to shed further light on the big baddie that may or may not be coming for Parker in the future. This newest inst

A Series Of (Un)Fortunate Reviews

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