Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Author: Christi Daugherty

Harper McClain lives for violence.  It’s not that she’s cruel or uncaring, it’s that she’s the journalist on the Savannah Daily News’ crime beat.  So a day without a hit-and-run, a major robbery, or a murder leaves Harper nothing about which to write.

Still, she’s overcome when she arrives at River Street, the most photographed place in the city, in response to a phone call from the cameraman with whom she works.  The victim, who has been shot to death, is someone she knows; it’s Naomi Scott, a law student by day and a bartender at Harper’s favorite pub, The Library Bar, at night.  Naomi was beautiful but reserved, a quiet young woman who would not seem to be the type of person to be gunned down in the middle of the night.

Bonnie Larson, who was with Harper when she got the call at The Library and goes with her to River Street, tells the police that Naomi had a boyfriend, Wilson Shepherd, a fellow student at the law school.  Wilson is a likeable young man, very devoted to her, Bonnie insists, but she admits that the two were “taking a break” in their relationship.  That, given the young man’s juvenile record, makes him suspect number one.

Hours later, the Savannah police have Wilson surrounded on a city street.  He’s protesting his innocence, but he has a gun pointed at the officers.  The more they yell at him to surrender, the more agitated he becomes, until members of the department’s SWAT team leap onto his back, throw him into the gutter, and handcuff him.

The police are confident that they have the killer, but Jarrod Scott, Naomi’s father, doesn’t believe it.  Jarrod contacts Harper at work and tells her that he knows Naomi was frightened of another man, although he doesn’t know exactly why.  The name he gives Harper is another of Naomi’s classmates, Peyton Anderson, son of the county’s former district attorney and a member of one of the city’s most prestigious families.

Harper has never met Peyton, but everyone in Savannah knows his family.  They meet at the memorial service for Naomi, and he admits to Harper that they were more than friends before she met Wilson but denies he knows anything about her murder.

On the strictly personal side, Harper is struggling with her sense that an intruder has been in her home more than once.  The clues are slight–a glass where she is certain she hadn’t put it when she left that morning, a faint smell of smoke–but they are making her apprehensive.  Why would anyone enter her place?  Is it done to intimidate her, or is the whole thing just her over-active imagination?

A Beautiful Corpse is a powerful follow-up to Christi Daugherty’s first Harper McClain novel, The Echo Killings.  Harper is a terrific protagonist, smart and independent but with a vulnerability that dates back to her childhood when she returned home from school and found her mother murdered.  That crime was never solved, and it is never far from Harper’s mind.

You can read more about Christi Daugherty 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.

Harper McClain has the job she loves in the city she adores.  She’s the crime reporter on the Daily News in Savannah, her home town, and she relishes every crime that comes in over her scanner.  That may sound heartless, but multi-car accidents, abductions, and murders are what get her blood flowing, as she would be the first to admit.

A call from Miles Jackson, a photographer on the paper, brings Harper to a part of the city that usually doesn’t get much violence.  But today is different, as she sees at least half a dozen detectives surrounding a house when she arrives at the address Miles gives her.  Talking to the neighbors, she learns that the victim is Marie Whitney, a divorced woman with an eleven-year-old daughter.  And when Harper sees young Camille gently being led to a waiting police car, the crime becomes very personal.

For Harper, this is déjà vu.  When she was twelve years old, she came home from school to find the bloody, nude body of her mother on the kitchen floor.  Despite an intensive investigation, the killer was never found.  Now Harper is frantic to get a look inside the home to see if this murder scene is reminiscent of the one that destroyed her family.

Circumventing the police and other reporters, she makes her way through a neighbor’s yard to a spot where she’s able to look into the Whitneys’ kitchen window.  And, confirming her worst fears, the scene is identical to the one in her head.  Marie Whitney is nude, with three stab wounds visible on her back and arms; even her hair was almost the same color as Harper’s mother’s had been.  Can it be the same killer at work more than a decade later?

The kitchen has been wiped clean of any clues, Harper learns.  There are no clothing threads, no fingerprints, no footprints, no DNA on any of the surfaces.   According to one police source, the killer must have been a professional.  But the reporter wonders why a hired killer would have murdered Marie, a secretary at the local college, a woman who surely didn’t have ties to any criminal group.  And certainly Harper’s mother wasn’t involved in anything illegal.

What has Harper determined to look into the crime, regardless of prohibitions by the police and her close friend Lieutenant Smith, is the look on Marie’s daughter’s face as she is led into a detective’s car.  That’s the same look that Harper knows she had when she was taken away from her mother’s corpse.  She needs to find the killer, both for young Camille and for herself.

There’s a very clever twist at the end of The Echo Killing that I certainly didn’t see coming.  Christi Daugherty has written what I hope will be the first in a series featuring a young professional woman who’s ready to go after what she wants, even if it means heading into a dangerous situation, to learn the truth.

You can read more about Christi Daugherty 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.