_Dead Connection_
by Alifair Burke
read by Christopher Lane
number one in the Ellie Hatcher series
At the time police detective Hatcher, a detective in the Wichita Police
Department, died his daughter Ellie had several ideas as to what she
might want to be when she grew up, but none of those ideas included
becoming a police officer or a detective herself. Her father's death
was ruled a suicide by the department, which denied his family both
insurance and his pension fund. Ellie, however, was always certain
that her dad was murdered by the serial killer he was pursuing.
She ended up in New York City, where she did her best to keep her eyes
on her free-living musician brother. As long as she was in the Big
Apple she started studying law, but ended up getting a degree in law
enforcement instead and joined the New York Police Department. Now a
detective, she's drawn away from the criminal fraud department where
she's been making a name for herself to partner up with Flann McIlroy
in the homicide division to assist in investigating the murders of two
women a year apart, both of whom had joined the First Date internet
dating service. Is it retired Detective Decker in the motor yacht with
a lead pipe? Or an unidentified hacker who's figured out how to get
into the servers at First Date?
The bullets that killed the first victim came from the same gun as that
used some months earlier to execute an FBI informant. As the pressure
steps up a notch Ellie has to accept that the killer could well be
hunting herself and her new partner.
I'm not a big fan of detective stories, but I got interested in James
Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux stories when my husband was introduced to
them by a friend, and have been intrigued by the suspense and the
characters much as I've loved those in the Travis McGee stories I
started reading as a teenager when my dad would leave his books on the
arm of his chair and my older brother and I'd read them while he was at
work. I suppose it was only natural I'd become interested in what
Burke's daughter Alifair would write, too.
It was interesting to see how Alifair started her Ellie Hatcher series,
and I loved how she managed to work her father's Dave Robicheaux into
the book in a cameo appearance as part of Hatcher and McIlroy's
investigation. I also appreciated that she didn't get anywhere as
deeply into the sexual liaison Ellie has with her new boyfriend as so
many other modern writers appear to do. Characters are well developed
and situations realistic. And the reader didn't blow regional names as
did the reader of one of her books set in Portland I reviewed about a
year ago.
Recommended.
Bonnie L. Sherrell
Teacher at Large
"Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. For even the very wise
cannot see all ends." LOTR
"Don't go where I can't follow."
