Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Author: Kristen Lepionka

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.

Still recovering from her father’s death and the mixed feelings she has about him, private investigator Roxane Weary takes on a new case.  She’s called by Danielle Stockton, the sister of a man on death row who’s two months away from being executed, to search for the person Danielle believes can prove her brother’s innocence.

Danielle is convinced that Brad was unjustly convicted of killing his girlfriend’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Cook.  Brad has always maintained his innocence despite the fact that the police found the murder weapon, a Kershaw folding knife, in his car.  The Cooks’ daughter, Sarah, disappeared on the night of the murder and hasn’t been seen in the fifteen years since.

The police consensus is that Brad killed Sarah as well, moving her body and disposing of it, something he also denies.  But when his attorney suggested that he name Sarah as the possible killer at the trial, Brad refused, vehemently denying she could have done any such thing.

Now Danielle tells Roxane that she saw Sarah the previous week walking out of a gas station; by the time Danielle was able to cross the busy intersection Sarah had driven away.  Danielle is certain Sarah would be able to exonerate Brad if Roxane could find her.   But Roxane has a lot of questions.  Can it be that Sarah has really reappeared after so long?  If it’s really Sarah, why didn’t she come forward at the trial to save her boyfriend, assuming his story is true?  What if Sarah doesn’t want to be found?  Or, if found, she says that Brad is in fact guilty?

At her mother’s house shortly after accepting the case, Roxane jimmies the lock on the door of the study, a room no one in the family except her father was allowed to enter.  Once inside she starts looking through the logs of cases he investigated while a police detective and comes across the one she herself is investigating.  She discovers that Sarah was not the only missing teenage girl in town, that there were at least two others.  Does this help or hurt her case?  Does it help to validate Brad’s story, or does it mean that he had killed before?

Roxane’s persistence in looking into the case is getting her in trouble with the police in Belmont, the town where the Cooks were knifed to death.  One officer after another pulls her car over or requests that she talk to them about why she’s in Belmont, and each one tells her he is convinced that the actual killer is in jail.  Even though Roxane brings up the unsolved cases of the other missing girls to the police chief, she’s not convincing anyone that Brad may be innocent or that Sarah may still be alive.

Roxane, as the popular saying goes, carries a lot of baggage.  There are the difficulties she’s had with her parents, her often out-of-control drinking, and her confusing sexual relations.  All of those things impinge on her personal life but not on her ability to investigate Brad’s case.  She’s tough, determined, often reckless, and you will be rooting for her success every step of the way.  The Last Place You Look is a terrific debut that will keep you mystified until the final chapter.

You can read about Kristen Lepionka at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.