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DOUBLE DEAD
by Terry Hoover
Five Star, January 2007
357 pages
$25.95
ISBN: 1594145873


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

It’s the 1960s. June Cleaver still isn’t an anachronism; Woodstock hasn’t happened. Steve Harlan is struggling to get his private eye business established in Charlotte, North Carolina. The reason he’s no longer a reporter is hinted at but never clearly stated; the closest anyone will come is that he wasn’t color-blind enough at some point in his reporting career.

He gets a call one morning from local big-time defense attorney George Warren. Warren has been hired to defend John Lattimore on charges that he brutally murdered his mistress Delores Green and (to make things look really rotten) then involve Delores’s 13-year-old son Greg in making the murder look like a natural death. The odds on Mr Lattimore walking on this one do not look good.

As Steve begins to check out the various witnesses, he gets a picture of Delores Green that varies considerably, depending on which witness he is talking to. He also learns more about John Lattimore’s personal life than perhaps anyone would really want to know. Nothing he learns really rules out Lattimore as the killer, although there are several other possible scenarios that may or may not be true.

The prosecution is going to present a case depicting John Lattimore as a man who killed his mistress by beating her to death, either because he was tired of her drinking problem or he thought she was cheating on him, or both. The pictures of her body, covered with bruises, will not do much to convince a jury otherwise; Lattimore is a very large man, with fists like hams.

The defense really would like to know what Delores Green was doing two nights before she died, when John was calling all over God’s green acre, trying to find her without any success. They contend that it was something in that time frame which caused her death, not John Lattimore.

As one might expect, Steve turns up all kinds of information, some of it relevant and some not. Somewhere along the line he makes someone nervous enough to threaten his wife and kids. When they are actually attacked, Susie Green handles the situation with a level of aplomb totally unexpected by Steve. Good for her.

DOUBLE DEAD is a very good first novel, with lots of potential in terms of character growth and a wide variety of stories available, given Steve’s occupation. If Hoover’s next book is as good as DOUBLE DEAD, she will be an author to watch.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, March 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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