Genre: Mystery
Digital Book
Henery Press
210 Pages
$6.99 Amazon
June 19, 2018
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Visiting a psychic is outside the norm for Ellison Russell. Finding bodies is not. Unfortunately, the psychic's crystal ball says she'll soon be surrounded by death. Again.
Drat.
Now there's a corpse in the front drive, a witchy neighbor ready to turn Ellison and her (not so) little dog into toadstools, and a stripped named Starry Knight occupying the guest room.
How did 1975 go so wrong so quickly?
Ellison must handle Mother (who's found a body of her own), make up with a certain handsome detective, and catch a killer, or the death surrounding her might be her own.
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While Ellison Russell is relieved that her life seems to be getting back to normal - almost - since she's not finding dead bodies every week, it's a strain to realize that she might have blown her relationship with police detective Anarchy Jones and is wondering how to fix it.
But things just aren't meant to be 'normal' for Ellison. Her friend Libba has dragged her to a psychic and Ellison pooh-poohs everything the woman says. Then when she hits a young girl with her car (the girl isn't hurt) but she seems to be freezing so Ellison literally gives her the coat off her back. Vowing to return the coat, Ellison goes home. But then she receives a visit from Anarchy's dreaded partner, Detective Peters, and he wants to know why her name and address were in the girl's possession...because the girl was found dead.
Now the psychic is calling Ellison at home, telling her she must meet with her because the dead girl, Leesa, has a message: She wants her to save a friend of hers named Starry Knight before she, too, is found dead somewhere. It is only by chance - and a blind date set up by Libba - that Ellison sees a young girl in the company of a man she had seen herself earlier when out with her daughter Grace - and not in a good way, either - and confronts them, finally convincing the girl to go with her.
Fortuitously, the girl turns out to be Starry - whose real name is Jane. Ellison takes her home with her, vowing to figure out a way to get her away from the life she's fallen into. But Ellison doesn't know that in doing so, she not only has put herself in danger, but also Grace, and even though it's brought Anarchy back into her life, is it worth the risk to take the chance and lose everything she holds dear?...
We are once again living the the 1970s, long before there were computers, cell phones, no GPS to track people and the technology many have come to take for granted. Because of this, it makes for a very good book indeed, when everyone had a land line and you either used it or drove to someone's home to speak with them.
When Ellison finds that her life might be in danger (again) this time Anarchy feels the need to spend the night (on her sofa) to protect her from the threats. As she's perfectly fine with this, her mother Frances is not. What will the neighbors think? More so, what will Frances think? But she has problems of her own: she's discovered an urn in her closet and she's called upon Ellison to find out to whom it belongs.
So Ellison and Aggie are hitting the local library microfiche to see if they can discover anyone who might have been displaced within the last few months but before they can find out Frances tells Ellison she knows who it is, and the answer rocks Ellison from her head to her toes. The end result puts a serious strain on her parents' lives, and now she's dealing with the fallout from that, too.
While the book is downright serious and sober, there are quite a few humorous moments that you can't help but chuckle at; and I actually found myself wanting to throttle Libba (and can't figure out why Ellison hasn't done so thus far).
It is a tale that is dark as midnight and riveting to boot; it shows us while reality slaps us in the face there are still those that refuse to believe the truth. As the pieces fall together, we see the ugliness in the world that masks itself in normality. Those that appear to be anything but sinister can be very much so. And Ellison, in all her wisdom of finding those bodies and having faced ugliness in the past - including from her own husband - is no stranger to seeing it close to home.
It is a story well-crafted, a narrative both dark and light; one that is always entertaining and magnificently written. As always, Ms. Mulhern draws us into Ellison's world and keeps us happily engrossed in what she has set down on paper and made to become real; her characters are animated and believable; her descriptions are convincing and give us something to look forward to when we first open the book.
In the end, when the killer is found and the story ends, we are left with a satisfying feeling that all is right with the world again (at least for awhile). I look forward to the next in the series. Highly recommended.
https://www.amazon.com/Shadow-Dancing-Country-Club-Murders-ebook/dp/B07BMJM89K/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2391675517
More on Julie Mulhern's Books: https://www.fantasticfiction.com/m/julie-mulhern/
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