Silence the Dead
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A body is exhumed—and a long-unsolved murder grows even more mysterious—in this "powerful" crime thriller set in small-town Illinois (Booklist).
Seventeen-year-old Betty Jo Dean was abducted and murdered thirty years ago. It took two days to find her body. She was found, fully dressed apart from her slacks, beneath a gnarled, stunted tree, shot in the back of the head. No one was ever charged in her death.
Now, following an appeal from one of his constituents, Mayor Mac Bassett has called for the case to be reopened. But when the body is exhumed, it is revealed that the skull, found loose in the coffin, does not belong to Betty Jo.
Mac is determined to solve a cold case that's becoming increasingly confounding. But no one in the small town of Grand Point is talking. Sheriffs, doctors, medical examiners: everyone seems to be warning Mac off. And then people start dying . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The opening of this solid whodunit, based on a real-life murder case, is certainly an attention getter. When the authorities exhume the corpse of Betty Jo Dean, who was shot to death in Grand Point, Ill., decades earlier at the age of 17, they see that she was buried only in her underwear. Grand Point's mayor, Mac Bassett, who "had imagined all sorts of horrors," insists that the fleshless, loose skull in the coffin is not Betty Jo's. Flash back to 1982: on the last night of her life, Betty Jo hooks up with a new beau. The following day, after Betty Jo has gone missing and the beau is found dead, Chicago reporter Jonah Ridl arrives in Grand Point to investigate, only to learn that local law enforcement is concealing the truth. In the present, Bassett discovers that the cover-up is still active and deadly. The ending is a bit of a letdown, but Fredrickson (The Dead Caller from Chicago and three other Dek Elstrom mysteries) does a decent job of portraying smalltown despair.
