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REVOLVER ROAD
by Christi Daugherty
Minotaur, March 2020
304 pages
$27.99
ISBN: 125023588X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

REVOLVER ROAD is Christi Daugherty's third Harper McClain Mystery. Harper is the crime reporter for the Savannah Daily News, a struggling newspaper caught in the rise of the digital revolution. The Daily News editor Emma Baxter must have exciting news or her owner will waste all her money and dump the paper.

And exciting news has just arrived. Savannah's rising star singer, Xavier Rayne, has disappeared on Tybee Island where Harper is also living, in hiding from a threat to her life that appeared in an anonymous email several months ago.

So Harper is on the story, which by the next day has become a murder. Harper manages to befriend Rayne's band mates and girlfriend at the house they share. It quickly becomes clear that one of them is the murderer but unclear which one of them did the deed.

As the story unfolds, Harper is busy gathering evidence and writing front-page stories about the murder. But things are unraveling in her own life as the killer from her past is getting closer and closer.

Harper must turn to her ex-boyfriend Luke, a detective on the Savannah Police Force, assigned to both cases. Their relationship has not worked out, but clearly they are both still in love.

Harper's hiding place has become a liability. She loses cell phone and scanner contact every time she must drive through the long marshes that separate Savannah and the island. And her protection, the police, and of course Luke, are back in the city. The marshes become the scene of a terrifying denouement, one of the most chilling I have ever read.

Christi Daugherty has a great character in Harper, tough but vulnerable, a real pro at crime detecting and reporting, with a back story that goes all the way back to the unsolved murder of her mother when Christi was twelve. She was practically adopted by the Savannah Police force while she grew up with her grandmother. Her father was the deadbeatist of all deadbeat dads.

The other characters who people REVOLVER ROAD include a best friend who is a painter moonlighting as a bartender to support her art, Miles, her photographer partner and friend who repairs cameras to supplement his gigs at the paper, and best of all, Luke.

I usually hate the romantic stuff in mystery novels but Dougherty avoids all the pitfalls – gooey sex scenes, being saved by the ex-boyfriend, and the happy reunion of the couple. She also handles racial differences as if they were just stuff that all civilized people have learned to deal with.

REVOLVER ROAD and Harper McClain are definitely keepers. Let's hope Harper is back soon.

§ Susan Hoover is a playwright, independent producer and retired college English teacher. She lives in Nova Scotia.

Reviewed by Susan Hoover, February 2020

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