Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Meet Roger Smith.  He’s a sixty-five-year-old widower who has spent his life working in the United States Printing Office, a man with a grown daughter and two grandchildren, who still lives in the house he and his late wife bought decades earlier.

Lying in bed in the middle of the night, he’s unable to sleep because of the red wine he drank at dinner even though he knew it would give him heartburn.  But something good comes from Roger’s insomnia.  If he had been sleeping, he never would have heard the very low beep-beep-beep of the home’s alarm system.

The system is a sophisticated one, with two motion detectors and video cameras at the front and back doors.  Although Roger doesn’t arm it when he’s home, the front and back door alarms are always working, and that’s what he’s hearing at 2 a.m.

Roger reaches under his bed for the aluminum bat that his late wife had insisted on buying and that he’s never used.  He moves behind his open bedroom door, preparing to call 911 until he realizes that his cell phone is in the living room.  Before he can think about his next step, the intruder walks into the bedroom and shoots where he thinks his victim will certainly be at this time of night, in bed.  But since Roger is actually behind the room’s door with a baseball bat in his hand, he has now become the dangerous opponent; he gives a mighty sweep of the bat and the man falls facedown on the floor.

As the lyrics to the song goes, “I’m an ordinary man.”  In fact, although Roger Smith is ordinary in many ways, he has an extraordinary ability, one that he started using decades ago when he was faced with insurmountable bills from his late wife’s illness.  He can create undetectable imitation passports, passports that are used by people wanted by the police and who need to leave the country in a hurry.

That’s where his relationship with John McKenna began and that’s whom he calls now.  He tells McKenna what transpired in the last ten minutes, and when McKenna asks him who the man is, Roger says he doesn’t know, has never seen him before.  He’s going to call the police as soon as he hangs up with John but asks John to get a lawyer over to his house immediately.  McKenna is the kind of man who always has a lawyer on standby.  Then Roger sits down to wait.

The surprises in this novel keep coming.  Just as the reader thinks he’s got the plot figured out, they discover another twist.  In addition, the characters are perfectly drawn.  There’s Roger, a seemingly meek man who discovers that he has, in fact, a spine of steel; he will not give in to the others who are sent to kill him but will turn the tables on them.  There’s McKenna, a wanna-be gangster who finds himself over his head with Roger’s problems.  Finally there’s Grace Lillinthal, a Washington, D. C. detective who is certain there’s more behind the home invasion than Roger is willing to admit.

Mike Lawson has written an outstanding mystery, with terrific characters and a storyline that provides one startling event after another.  You can read more about the author at this website.

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.

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