It’s a Mystery: “Suffer the dark, go to the light whenever it’s there”
/Let the Dead Speak
By Jane CaseyMinotaur, 2017Nothing Stays BuriedBy P.J. TracyPutnam, 2017 Let the Dead Speak is the seventh in Jane Casey’s addictive series (following 2016’s After the Fire) starring Maeve Kerrigan of London’s Metropolitan Police. As it begins, newly promoted Detective Sergeant Kerrigan and her colleague in crime as well as an unwavering thorn in her side, DCI Josh Derwent, are called to the home of divorcée Kate Emery. Also on hand is their boss Una Burt; Kev Cox, Crime scene manager who Burt calls “the best in the business”; and Georgia Shaw, pretty, young, new to the team and in Kerrigan’s opinion “absolutely useless.”There is blood everywhere but no body. Chloe Emery, 18, Kate’s only child, returned unexpectedly from the house of her father and stepmother to encounter the horrific slaughterhouse scene and no sign of her mother. As Burt, puts it:
No body. At this stage we can’t even be certain who we’re looking for. We won’t be sure of that until the DNA results come back. What we do know so far is that Kate Emery hasn’t been seen since Wednesday night. We could run this as a missing person inquiry but I don’t want to waste time. She’s left her phone, her handbag, her wallet, her keys and a whole lot of blood behind. There’s no way someone loses that much blood and walks away. We’ll hope for a sighting of her alive and well, but what we’re really looking for is a corpse.
Meanwhile, Chloe, determined not to go back and stay with her father, is taken in by Eleanor and Oliver Norris, the ultra-religious neighbors whose 15-year-old daughter Bethany is Chloe’s best friend. The Norris’s are not exactly welcoming. They make it clear that they disapproved of single mother Kate, who often entertained male visitors. Their wall of silence only invites scrutiny as Kerrigan and her team treats this as a murder case, albeit without a victim.Then the two girls disappear and everything changes. Following their trail uncovers a raft of revelations. Their searchlight hones in on a neighborhood rife with secrets and no shortage of suspects. Among them, William Turner, who was once accused of stabbing a schoolmate and is still stigmatized by the experience. When interviewed, he turns alternately sullen and arrogant. What is he hiding? What are they all hiding? What sent the girls undercover? The answers come with a slam dunk final twist that you’ll never see coming.As always with Casey’s novels, the feisty Maeve Kerrigan holds the center and fascinates us as often as she infuriates us. She combines ambition and insecurity. She’s smart, funny and second guesses herself at every turn. It’s a highly seductive mixture. The Jane Casey mysteries are intricate, potent and powerful. Let the Dead Speak is one of her best.
It is a singular pleasure to welcome back the Monkeewrench computer wizards. Nothing Stays Buried is the eighth installment (after 2016’s The Sixth Idea) in this thoroughly engaging series. It begins when Minneapolis homicide detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth, the canny cops who are the linchpin of these novels, are called to a crime scene in a heavily wooded city park. Everything about the setting is eerily familiar. The victim is a pretty young woman who has been strangled, her torso crisscrossed with deep slashes, no outward sign of sexual assault and a playing card inserted in her tank top. Last year the same scene played out in a different park. The victim of that unsolved crime, Megan Lynn, had the ace of spades planted on her. This year’s victim has the four of spades. Their worst nightmare is confirmed: they’ve got a serial killer on the loose. And fifty cards left!Across town, Grace MacBride and her highly eccentric team of computer wizards in Monkeewrench Software—Harley Davidson, Annie Belinsky, and Roadrunner—take on a missing person case. Harley has an “old sheriff buddy” whose friend, a farmer named Walt, has a daughter, Marla, who disappeared several months ago. Since she’s vanished, Magozzi and Rolseth have been trying to find some clue that links her to Megan Lynn. But that clue never materialized because Marla’s body was never found. So Walt and Magozzi ask the Monkeewrench team to lend a hand. Since Grace happens to be carrying Magozzi’s child, they can’t refuse.So the gang fires up their state-of-the-art mobile computer lab and prepares to head for Buttonwillow, Minnesota to meet Walt. On the road Grace reflects:
She loved every one of these geeks and freaks. But that’s all they were. They weren’t cops, they weren’t detectives, they were just a motley collection of computer geniuses who’d developed crime-solving hardware that connected all the faded dots and made it easier for the cops to catch the bad guys.
Interrupting her reverie:
…Annie passed a sour face on to Grace. “The last time you took me on a country drive is not exactly my favorite memory.”“Hey,” Grace grinned at her. “You swam with dead cows, you connected with Mother Earth, you saved the world. And you were magnificent.”Annie grunted and looked off to the side. “Yes, I was."
Back in Minneapolis, the violence accelerates. They now have four dead women and a freak still on the loose. One turns up with the four of spades, and two more corpses account for the five and six. Magozzi and Gino must face the gruesome reality that their killer is planning to complete the deck.They enlist Monkeewrench to help stop the carnage. The gang go at it full throttle, using every weapon in their not inconsiderable arsenal. The two investigations collide when it appears that the same killer may be involved in both: forensic clues in Marla’s case point toward a Mexican cartel member, as does a DNA analysis in the police case.As an elaborate, often baffling web of evidence piles up, the cops and Monkeewwrench make the off-the-wall connections between a farmer’s missing daughter, a serial killer, and a decades old stabbing which brings them face to face with evil incarnate.Nothing Stays Buried is world class suspense stylishly laced with acid wit and enhanced by an eccentric cast of characters you won’t soon forget.Here it must be noted that P.J. Tracy is the pseudonym of the mother and daughter team: Patricia and Traci Lambrecht. Patricia passed away this year and we can but hope that Traci continues writing Monkeewrench novels.____Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.
