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Shoot the Lawyer Twice (A Rep and Melissa Pennyworth Mystery)

Michael Bowen
Poisoned Pen Press (2008)
ISBN 9781590585306
Reviewed by Kam Aures for RebeccasReads (5/08)

“Shoot the Lawyer Twice” is Michael Bowen’s fourth mystery featuring the duo of Rep and Melissa Pennyworth.  In this novel, Jimmy Clevenger, a frat boy, finds himself accused of piracy on the high seas after climbing aboard a woman’s boat for a party and using the expression of “sex or swim.”  The woman, Caroline Hoeckstra, after swimming to shore, accuses him of attempted rape. 

Rep and Melissa have just moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin within the past year.  Rep is a lawyer and Melissa is an English professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  While Rep believes himself to be the victim of a publicity stunt, Melissa finds a simple intellectual exchange at the General Convocation of the Bronte Society of North America lands her in hot water.  Before she knows it she is involved in a laundry list of crimes including burglary, forgery and murder.  Together, Rep and Melissa use their skills to try to attempt to figure out what is happening.

While I have not read any of Bowen’s previous Rep and Melissa Pennyworth mystery novels, I was able to jump right into this one without any confusion as to who was who, so even though it is part of a series it still works well as a standalone novel.  If I had to use two words to describe this novel, I would use “intellectual mystery.”  Bowen’s writing is full of scholarly exchanges that I found to be quite interesting and intellectually-stimulating.

Humorous at times, some of the writing is a little too over the top.  For instance, in one scene, Melissa is upset.  She has made it a rule never to use foul language, but under the circumstances, she decides to go against that rule.  “She cut loose.  Not with the usual stream of blasphemies and obscenities available nightly on HBO and Comedy Central.  She was, after all, a Ph.D. in English.  She began with a couple of ripe selections from Chaucer and then, warming up, plumbed the richest depths of the Anglo-Saxon canon.  She included some oaths that Grendel’s mom had undoubtedly keened when she got the news about Beowulf, and then threw in a couple of Celtic variations that Boadicea must have screeched while the Romans were flogging her for insolence, just before her rebellion bathed Roman Britain in fire and blood.” (p. 61)   However, despite the dramatics, “Shoot the Lawyer Twice” is a solid book that I am sure fans of the Pennyworth series, and anyone who enjoys stimulating mysteries, will enjoy.

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