Eleanor Taylor Bland (1944–2010)

In her thirteenth outing, African-American homicide detective Marti MacAlister discovers that when the banks of the Des Plaines River overflow, the river divulges other secrets. Marti and her partner Vik are called to investigate the body of a female found by some boys playing in the flooded area. Additionally, their lieutenant expects them to keep working the sixty-year-old cold case of a male skeleton found with an obvious gunshot wound. As Marti and Vik dig deeper into both cases, they show more find amazing connections between the two apparently unrelated murders. Secrets harbored by Lincoln Park old-timers, and a Romanian priest, will have to be exposed before justice can be served. Bland, a Waukegan native, has written an excellent police procedural which fleshes out the characters by showing their trials and tribulations, both on the job and in their personal lives. show less

While the mix of different deaths in the same local in widely spaced timeframe was well done, there were parts I found boring. Who really cares about the detectives children's sports? Even Detective Vic is somewhat of an extra. I thought the detectives spent too much time sitting around the archaeological dig site. Didn't they have anything else to do while the experts do their work?

The first 60 pages were really hard to get through. Let's face it, Marti is pretty boring. About halfway through, the story picked up and I couldn't put it down!

Eleanor Taylor Bland's first novel is the first in the Marti MacAlister series. MacAlister is a black woman policeman who is a widow. She has moved from Chicago to the Lincoln Praire, IL. A mentally-ill woman in a low-rent apartment has been murdered. Kids have been seen in the building and might be witnesses, but no one can find them.

The book is well-done for a first novel. Marti is engaging character. The plot is reasonable. I look forward to later books in the series.