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The Dead Husband

R. J. Brown
Big River Press (2009)
ISBN 9780979874475
Reviewed by Enid Grabiner for Rebecca's Reads (6/09)


As a young immigrant from London, Sally Collier, is trained as a secretary and emigrates to Chicago to begin her new life.  Finding herself a single mother of two with no support from their father, she embarks on a new journey, first to California and then to Washington State, each step finding someone to mentor her.  

Sally, char extraordinaire, finds herself in a very messy situation.  As head of a cleaning group, Sal’s Gals, she is off to clean a property of a longstanding client, only to find him dead and buried in his garden.  Talk about pushing up the daisies!  It is the obvious result of foul play and Sally is embroiled in the investigation.

As a longtime friend of the victim Mel Birnbaum, she has a long personal history with his surviving family: a cheating wife and her boss/paramour, a needy teenage daughter and Mel’s aging parents.  With the help of boyfriend, George, the Chief of Detectives in Jefferson County, she tries to extricate herself from the situation while maintaining her cleaning service.

Sally is a caring and involved and her relationships with friends, lovers and clients are never casual.  This novel seems to be setting up a back-story in development of a future series.  There are many extraneous facts and characters that pop up that have no important connection to the mystery at hand.  Often the side descriptions detract from the movement of the novel, "The Dead Husband."  Having said that, there is a potential for Brown to create a rich likeable character for future novels in this series.

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