Marilyn's Mystery Reads

When Roxane Weary’s phone rings at 3 a.m., she has the feeling most of us have–it’s never good news when someone calls in the middle of the night.  And she’s right.

Roxane’s brother Andrew is the caller.  He tells her something weird is going on, then hangs up.  When Roxane gets to his apartment he gives her the rest of the story, brief as it is.  A woman he worked with some years earlier, whom he thinks is called Addison, rang his apartment buzzer about an hour earlier.  She was distraught and said she needed to use his phone, which she did, leaving a whispered message on the voicemail at the other end, and Andrew has no idea whom she called.

When Andrew tries to calm her down she bolts, saying she can’t call the police and he shouldn’t either.  But Andrew has no wish to call the authorities because he’s a low-level marijuana dealer and doesn’t want the cops in his apartment.  That explains his call to his sister, a private investigator, someone who will believe his unlikely story.

Using social media, Roxane manages to find out where Addison lives, but when she arrives at the house the woman’s roommate says that Addison isn’t there but had been earlier in the morning.  She mentions that Addison had been working as a deejay at a nearby nightclub under the name DJ Raddish.

She also tells Roxane that someone had been looking for Addison several days earlier, a policeman in fact.  But when Roxane calls the policeman’s number on the card he left behind, there’s no answer.  She digs more deeply into social media and discovers that the club where Addison works is across the street from Andrew’s apartment.

Roxane’s next step is to check out the nightclub, Nightshade, but when she does she gets an unpleasant surprise.  Bo, the bodyguard of gangster Vincent Pomp, is in front of the building.  Bo tells her that the owner of the club took a loan from Pomp, but now the owner has disappeared, the club is deserted, the door is locked.  Bo doesn’t have any answers to Roxane’s questions, so she decides to go to Pomp in the morning to learn what his interest is in Nightshade and if he knows where to find the missing owner.

The more deeply Roxane looks into the case, the more the characters and their strange stories come into focus.  There are the two sisters, Jordana and Carlie, who don’t seem overly concerned that Addison is missing from the apartment she shares with Carlie.  There is the policeman, Detective Dillman, who doesn’t answer his cell phone.  There is Catherine, with whom Roxane has an off-again, on-again relationship, in part due to the fact that Catherine is still married and living in her husband’s house.

Roxane Weary is a terrific heroine, and The Stories You Tell is a terrific mystery.  She is tough, smart, and yet vulnerable when it comes to her relationships with friends and family.  And those relationships are very, very complicated, as are the stories people tell her and themselves.

You can read more about Kristen Lepionka at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.