Marilyn's Mystery Reads

May 1st is a day that strikes fear into residents of small Midwestern towns.  On that day a serial killer strikes, killing a girl and taking her body where it can’t be found.

The Anniversary opens in 1992, several years after the killings have begun.  To Jules Delaney and Quinn Riley it starts off as a typical day, although there’s a concert that night that Jules is looking forward to.  But after the concert, when she gets into her car, the killer is waiting for her.  This time he spares his victim, if raping her can be called sparing her, and leaves Jules alive.  She doesn’t tell her parents or the police, keeping her terrible secret inside.

After the concert, Quinn gets involved in a fight between boys from his high school and another school.  He punches a boy from the other school, and unfortunately the boy’s head hits the ground hard.  He survives, but Quinn spends the next two and a half years in jail, spared a much longer sentence because the victim lived.  His dream of college is destroyed, however, and so he takes the warden’s advice and joins the army after he’s released, planning to get his GED there and hopefully go on to junior college.

Jules, meanwhile, has become a highly successful model.  She’s living a glamorous life, traveling to exotic locales for photo shoots, and making a good deal of money.  But her past is always with her, and she continues to feel guilty that she didn’t notify the police of her attack.  Perhaps that would have helped them locate the May Day Killer.

While Quinn was incarcerated, his mother was brutally killed with repeated blows to her head with a hammer; no one has ever been arrested for the crime.  His developmentally challenged younger brother is still in a special facility, with no hope that he will ever be able to live on his own.  His uncle Pat, his mother’s brother, is Quinn’s only other relative; he’s a fun guy to spend time with but not much of a role model.

Upon his release from the army, Quinn visits Mrs. Glomm, a work colleague of his late mother’s.  She has the few items that were left behind in Quinn’s mother’s work locker after her death.

Mrs. Glomm tells him that she believes his mother had found irregularities in the books where both women worked, something she had told the police after Quinn’s mother’s murder, but she doesn’t know if the police ever investigated.  She also told Quinn that his mother said she kept the information in her Red File, in a safe place, and Quinn knows where that is.  He goes to their old home, now abandoned, and opens the hiding place everyone in his family knew about.  Inside is not a File but a hammer covered with hair and blood.

Alex Finlay has written another outstanding thriller.  His protagonists are totally credible, their actions convincing.  Even when they act in ways the reader wishes they wouldn’t, the reader will recognize that that is the way teenagers behave, even if it’s to their own detriment.  The Anniversary will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very end.

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Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novels.