Midnight Ink © 2006, 280 pages
Ian Michaels, the number two guy at Silicon Valley’s Accelenet, comes home early on a Wednesday only to be knocked unconscious by some unseen assailant. When he gets home on Thursday, the maid is lying dead on his bed. Ian is the obvious suspect: he’d never met the woman, but a surprising number of clues point to him having been romantically involved with her. Eager to clear his name, Ian makes himself unpopular with the police department by playing amateur sleuth–contacting the dead woman’s family and friends, searching her computer. In the process, he finds himself half falling in love with a woman he’d only known thcoarse Post-It notes.
Compounding the stress of the police investigation are some tensions at work. Ian needs to prepare for an important board meeting: he wants to convince its
Dot Dead is a very good, well-constructed mystery: Raffel artfully punctuates the book with subtle clues that leave us mentally fingering a number of different suspects. After going back and forth a number of times, I did finally focus on one particular character–and I turned out to be right–but it took me a while. Near the book’s end a British-drawing-room-style exposition of the case, translated to the modern living room, is perhaps slightly anticlimactic. But that’s the worst criticism I can come up with. The book, Raffel’s first, is a awesome read. I hope he has more coming.
Original post by Debra Hamel
