MARCH OF CRIME
Jess Lourey
Midnight Ink
September 8, 2017
Mira James has become the Jessica Fletcher of Battle Lake. She has found a corpse every month since she moved to the small northern Minnesota town in May. That makes 10 dead bodies, if you’re playing along at home. She realizes that this is weird and that it hasn’t made her any friends with the local law enforcement.
As you can guess, Mira stumbles upon another deceased resident in MARCH OF CRIME by Jess Lourey. This time she literally bumps into it at the local café. One of the residents of the Battle Lake Senior Sunset has taken up a new hobby of creating life-size dolls. Someone has hidden a dead body inside one of these dolls and Mira is the unfortunate person to discover it. The Battle Lake police chief is getting suspicious of Mira and the trail of bodies that seem to continually follow in her wake, so he immediately thinks she’s behind the latest corpse. Mira works with her octogenarian best friend, Mrs. Berns, and the Battle Lake mayor, Kennie Rogers, to locate the real killer and keep herself out of jail.
Mira and her crew find that there are multiple murder suspects. There is well-healed couple volunteering around Battle Lake as part of the Seeking Life Under Many Names (SLUMN) organization, a “domestic study abroad program”. There is the foster kid appearing around town and offering to do different odd jobs for the locals. Lourey introduces multiple red herrings in MARCH OF CRIME and masters misdirection in the book.
Lourey’s plucky heroine keeps me coming back month in and month out to her Murder of the Month series. Mira is a flawed woman who knows she has baggage and does what she can to be the best person that she can be. She originally moved to Battle Lake in the first place to try to escape the slew of bad decisions she had made. Mira wants nothing more than to live her life and move past the mistakes of her youth. But when bodies start piling up again – in this case, real bodies stacked inside doll bodies – Mira has no choice but to gather her allies and fight to clear her name.
MARCH OF CRIME is yet another success in my favorite ongoing series. I’ll be waiting to see Mira’s next adventures in April!
Kate Malmon
