Publisher's Weekly
In her fourth appearance (after The Gemini Man ), freelance crime writer Liz Connors of Cambridge, Mass., leads a group of interested friends--two from the Cambridge police force and two local reporters--to solve a confluence of crimes that threaten the career and life of her lover, police Lt. Jack Lingeman. A broad sweep of seemingly unrelated crimes--the killing of a local businessman, the vicious serial beatings of women and murder of another--is followed by charges of corruption levied against Jack by a former cop. Soon Jack is charged with rape by a woman whose son he had arrested years before. When Jack is jailed after that woman is killed with his gun, Liz and company go into action. Liz is thoroughly likable in her worry and the action she takes to save Jack; she disappoints, however, in failing to make connections between crimes that the reader can't miss, and she jettisons her hard-won credibility in the melodramatic finale. Excluding these lapses, however, Kelly's heroine is as recognizable as a neighbor or friend, and as such, her adventures earn our interest.
Library Journal
Those familiar with Kelly's protagonist, free-lance true crime writer Elizabeth Connor, will be upset to know that her live-in policeman lover, Detective John Lingemann, has been framed. His higher-ups suspend John when a woman connected with a three-year-old case accuses him of rape; then, his gun fires the shots that kill the woman. Connor subsequently joins forces with two journalist friends and two sympathetic detectives to prove John's innocence. This so-so plot works well enough most of the time; however, narrator Connor's occasional lapses into uncharacteristic stupidity, the uneven prose, and the overall lack of conviction make this a marginal purchase.
Genre: Mystery
In her fourth appearance (after The Gemini Man ), freelance crime writer Liz Connors of Cambridge, Mass., leads a group of interested friends--two from the Cambridge police force and two local reporters--to solve a confluence of crimes that threaten the career and life of her lover, police Lt. Jack Lingeman. A broad sweep of seemingly unrelated crimes--the killing of a local businessman, the vicious serial beatings of women and murder of another--is followed by charges of corruption levied against Jack by a former cop. Soon Jack is charged with rape by a woman whose son he had arrested years before. When Jack is jailed after that woman is killed with his gun, Liz and company go into action. Liz is thoroughly likable in her worry and the action she takes to save Jack; she disappoints, however, in failing to make connections between crimes that the reader can't miss, and she jettisons her hard-won credibility in the melodramatic finale. Excluding these lapses, however, Kelly's heroine is as recognizable as a neighbor or friend, and as such, her adventures earn our interest.
Library Journal
Those familiar with Kelly's protagonist, free-lance true crime writer Elizabeth Connor, will be upset to know that her live-in policeman lover, Detective John Lingemann, has been framed. His higher-ups suspend John when a woman connected with a three-year-old case accuses him of rape; then, his gun fires the shots that kill the woman. Connor subsequently joins forces with two journalist friends and two sympathetic detectives to prove John's innocence. This so-so plot works well enough most of the time; however, narrator Connor's occasional lapses into uncharacteristic stupidity, the uneven prose, and the overall lack of conviction make this a marginal purchase.
Genre: Mystery
Visitors also looked at these books
Used availability for Susan Kelly's Until Proven Innocent