Ghost

Angela Masters Detective Novels #4

by Mike Worley

A young couple have what seems to be a comfortable life until one day when the husband returns home from work to find his wife brutally murdered in their apartment. Police find no signs of a break-in and the husband assures investigators that his wife was extremely cautious about home security. She wouldn’t open the door to someone she didn't know. Witnesses report an unknown man in the area but efforts to locate him are frustrated. The case goes cold until a year later when another woman is similarly attacked and new information causes Detective Angela Masters to re-examine old theories. The pressure is on for her to locate the killer before he can strike again.

257 pages, Paperback

First published October 31, 2013

About the author

Police officer, investigations commander, chief of police, university instructor, national consultant. Mike Worley brings a varied background to his development of detective mysteries. On top of that, each of his stories contains elements of real cases, so there is built-in realism even though the stories themselves are fiction.

Mike is a veteran of 34 years in law enforcement. His career spanned the ranks from patrol officer to captain in the Boise Idaho Police Department. He served as an investigative commander in both criminal investigations and in internal affairs. He was later selected to serve at chief of police in suburban Meridian, Idaho.

Upon his retirement from active law enforcement, Mike continued to serve the law enforcement community for six years as an instructor and course coordinator for the Southern Police Institute, the in-service training arm of the Justice Administration Department of the University of Louisville. He also owned a national consulting practice focusing on issues regarding police policy.

He is retired and lives in Louisville, KY with his wife, Nancy. When he's not writing, he is active with University of Louisville athletics, serving as the official scorer for Louisville Volleyball. He was also selected by the NCAA to score the 2010 Division II and 2012 Division I women's volleyball national championship matches. Additionally, he assists with media relations for basketball and football.

Reviews

[Nada Sobhi · Rating 4 out of 5]

GHOST by Mike Worley is part of the Angela Masters Detective Series and it is my second read for Mr. Worley. GHOST precedes ENTITLEMENT, and though I was familiar with the characters, I felt GHOST gave them more depth especially the lead detective/protagonist Angela.
GHOST opens with the rape and murder of Amanda Jensen. Despite their best efforts, detectives Angela Masters and Julie Phelps exhaust all their leads and the case stays open for almost a year, until finally a new lead appears.
In GHOST, we see a lot of character-background, which helps the reader form a better picture of each character. The pace of the novel is not as quick as ENTITLEMENT, since the case stays open for a while; nonetheless it is not a bad pace since it is divided into 46 short.
Since the novel is set in 1986, DNA-testing is highly expensive, not unheard of but has never been used in court. It’s not as easy as seen in modern TV-series like CSI. GHOST shows how good Angela Masters is as a criminal profiler; however, she eventually realises that criminal-profiling still bears much guess work as compared to real detective work.
I must say GHOST, for me, was a quick read but was still slower than its successor ENTITLEMENT.
GHOST is an interesting crime novel with a strange but happy ending.

[Britt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoy the writing style of Mike Worley, a former law enforcement officer of many years. Worley shows his strengths in detail and description in this particular Angela Master's novel "Ghost." A murder that affects a community, multiple families and the over all moral of a neighborhood; Worley brought action and drama. Ghost reads like a movie script, it flows smooth like water and grabs your attention from page one.

The Angela Master's character is a strong woman in a time when women are just getting good recognition for their police work. She and her partner Jules take pride and going over every detail, leaving no stone un-turned. The dedication these two have towards the case in this neighborhood is what really drives this novel. You (the reader) will get caught up in trying to solve this mystery and looking for all of the players.

In retrospect the cover to this novel is spot on. I do not want to give any details away or spoil the novel, but the cover fits the lack of definition in the figure on the cover adds another layer of mystery.

[Rena · Rating 3 out of 5]

Won this book from Goodreads.

This is written by a former police detective, so it's very accurate in the portrayal of crime-solving. It's part of a series, but this can be real alone, as I did. The story takes place in the 1980's, before all the fancy CSI-tech stuff was commonplace. So DNA was in its infancy, you couldn't track cell phones, etc. (I sometimes wonder when I read current books how those plots would have been solved without DNA and other modern forensics, so it was interesting to read this book which focuses on normal detective work by the police.) The mystery itself was good, there is a lot to figure out. But the writing is very matter-of-fact. There's no embellishment, just the facts. There is something interesting in the book, about how people of one race view those of a different race, so I'm glad to learn something new.