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Summary: Can a Single Sleuthing Mom Know any Peace?
Review: Manchester sleuth and single parent Sal Kilkenny and her seven-year-old daughter Maddie share a house with single father Ray and his son Tom. She's a working woman who struggles to balance the pressures and problems of private and professional life. Problems such as Maddie's sudden reluctance to go to school and the fact that she's unwilling to talk about it and that she's misbehaving in ways she never would have before. Problems such as the case of Lucy Barker, a young woman who works at a Salford hotel and has been receiving poison pen letters threatening her death. Problems such as the case she is working for a middle-aged couple who are buying a house in an expensive area. They want the neighborhood checked out and while doing that Sal has to stake out the street in the nighttime cold. There seems to be very little to go on as far as the second problem is concerned, because Lucy has few friends, her parents live in Australia and her fiancé had been killed in auto accident from which she barely escaped with her life. The third problem has Sal out in the artic-like cold investigating the people who live in a derelet house and also a pair of lesbians, one of which is abusing the other. And then there is always the problem of her daughter in the back of her mind. As the problems escalate Sal is pulled in three different directions, pulling the reader right along with her. Ms. Staincliffe knows how to jump from one plotline to another without losing her reader's interest. She knows how to use the treat of violence to keep the suspense flowing and she knows how to make you like her heroine, even though said heroine can sometimes be as infuriating as all heck. But as infuriating as Sal sometimes gets, she's a great character and I really liked this book. Reviewed by Lenore Douglass
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