When Native American artist Blue Mountain Cat is murdered during a showing at a conservative art museum, detective John Thinnes uncovers a host of possible suspects, including the victim's wife, a greedy developer, an unscrupulous antiquities dealer, and a lovely Navajo woman, among others.
Michael Dymmoch was born in Illinois and grew up in a suburb northwest of Kentucky. As a child she kept a large number of small vertebrates for pets and aspired to become a snake charmer, Indian chief or veterinarian. She was precluded from realizing the former ambitions by a lack of charm and Indian ancestry and from the achieving the latter by poor grades in calculus and physics. This made her angry enough to kill. Fortunately, before committing mayhem, she stumbled upon a book titled Maybe You Should Write a Book and was persuaded to sublimate her felonious fantasies. Moving to Chicago gave Michael additional incentives to harm individuals who piss her off. On paper of course.
Michael Dymmoch is one of the best writers of police fiction alive today. Vastly underrated, her books take you immediately inside the minds and daily activities of interesting motivated cops and aides. The Chicago Ed McBain.
A slowly developing friendship and respect between the two main characters continues within a very complex who done it mystery. I am really enjoying these books so far.
The mysteries in this series are good. The characters have depth and their history and motivations are being slowly revealed. This second in the series, however, was jarring at times. Told more from the police side, the constant use of "cauc" describing characters was annoying. Also, while obviously intended to show the nastiness of certain characters and not to be taken as the tone of the novel, the prevalent racism and offensive terms being used were off putting.
Perfect. I'm glad Caleb got himself some action :) Thiness and his stereotypes are still a bit off putting, though, I just hope things will be better in the next installment :)