Mysterious Reviews, mysteries reviewed by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books, is publishing a new review of Peace, Love and Murder by Nancy Holzner. For our blog readers, we are printing it first here in advance of its publication on our website.
Peace, Love and Murder by Nancy Holzner
A Bo Forrester Mystery
Five Star (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-59414-775-2 (1594147752)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59414-775-3 (9781594147753)
Publication Date: August 2009
List Price: $25.95
Review: Nancy Holzner introduces upstate New York cab driver Bo Forrester who's under suspicion after police stop him for a minor traffic violation and then find a body in the trunk of his car in Peace, Love, and Murder.
The dead man is Fred Davies, founder of the Davies Foundation for the Arts, which operated the Finger Lake Artists in Residence program, promoting promising talent who passed their rigorous application process. Though Bo isn't a suspect, he's a person of interest and Deputy Trudy Hauser takes it upon herself to link Bo to the crime. A few days later when one of Bo's fares turns up murdered, he really looks guilty. So if the police think he's involved, he might as well be, and seeks to discover who really killed Fred Davies and why they're trying to frame Bo for the murder.
There's no shortage of people who might have wanted Davies dead, and this diverse group keeps Peace, Love, and Murder interesting. A financial officer for the foundation with a gambling problem, an art expert who fancies herself a femme fatale, a skinny white rapper artist trying to make a name for himself, and more. The only character who is really unlikeable, at least initially, is Deputy Trudy Hauser. Her antics seem more appropriate for a teenager than a law enforcement professional. That she and Bo will ultimately work together is a given; it's just that the tension that supposedly exists between them early in the book seems forced and unnatural. Still, the story serves as a good introduction to the characters and gives Bo and Trudy a challenging puzzle to solve.
In a promising twist for future books in the series, the reasons Bo has returned to his home town is to look for his parents, hippies from the 60s from whom he has been estranged and lost contact with. Peppered throughout Peace, Love, and Murder are references to his parents and Bo's search for them; the conclusion of the book offers a hint where they might be ... and is likely the setting for more amateur sleuthing by Bo Forrester.
Special thanks to Nancy Holzner for providing an ARC of Peace, Love and Murder for this review.
Review Copyright © 2009 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
If you are interested in purchasing Peace, Love and Murder from Amazon.com, please click the button to the right.
Synopsis (from the publisher): Finding a corpse in the trunk of your cab is a rotten way to start the day. For Bo Forrester, things go straight downhill from there. The cops are asking an awful lot of questions. The murder weapon turns up too close for comfort. And the attractive woman giving him the eye turns out to be Trudy Hauser, a cute-but-crazy deputy dead set on arresting him for murder.
Bo returned to Rhodes, an upstate New York college town, hoping to reconcile with his parents, gentle hippies who couldn’t accept his decision to join the Army at eighteen. Twenty years later, the commune where he grew up is a subdivision, and his parents are long gone. Pondering his next move, Bo takes a job driving a cab. And he has no clue how the bullet-riddled body of art philanthropist Fred Davies ended up in the trunk.
Now, he can’t turn around without bumping into Trudy—it’s not her case, but that’s not slowing her down. The local cops, suspecting robbery as the motive, are right behind her. When Davies’s beautiful widow asks Bo for help, he can’t say no. Starting his own investigation, he’s plunged into a world of privilege, corruption, and high-stakes greed. A lot of people had reason to want Davies dead: a flirtatious art history professor with a taste for booze and men; her insanely jealous, ex-felon husband; the business partner with a secret addiction; and an avant-garde artist who proclaims that murder is the ultimate art form.
As the body count escalates, Bo must combine the skills he learned as a soldier with the values he grew up with on the commune to flush out a vicious murderer—if he manages to stay alive that long.
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GOOD BOOK!
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