Dead of the Day

Annie Seymour is employed by the New Haven, Connecticut’s newspaper, The New Haven Herald as a police reporter. She is following a lead after a body comes floating to the surface of the harbor. As she follows leads, she gets deeper and deeper into a scheme that is allowing illegal Mexican immigrants to gain fake green cards.

Annie has two ex’s out there, Tom the police officer she quit seeing when she fell hard for Vinny, a private detective. Vinny and her relationship went south over their Christmas plans, and four months later, she still has not spoken to him. When Vinny’s brother turns up to shadow her, telling her he is writing a novel about a female reporter and needs background, she finds it suspicious but lets him tag along in hopes of getting to see Vinny again.

As Annie learns more about what she should not know, she has trouble piecing her story together. The plot twists and turns and involves secondary characters that make this an amazingly well written mystery. Annie is complex and emotionally driven; she falls quickly into the plot and needs answers - when someone starts trying to hurt her, she just needs to know more before she can back off. Finding out her mother is involved makes it a more complex situation, and even though she knows it is a bad scene, she still keeps burrowing on.

This is a great read with just enough romance to keep romance readers happy. The mystery is fast paced, well developed and heart wrenching. This reader read this novel straight through, and enjoyed it immensely. Nothing prepared her for whom the villains were, they are complex characters who are not what they seem…

As part of the Annie Seymour Mystery series, this reader was intrigued, and will be searching out more of Karen E. Olson’s novels. This is the third in the series, and there is a fourth due out in November 2008, nine months may be long a time to wait for a novel, but I suspect the fourth in this series, SHOT GIRL will be well worth the wait!

March 2008