Tuesday, February 6, 2018

Perish

Title: Perish
Author: Lisa Black
Published: January 30th 2018 by Kensington
Format: eBook,320 pages
Genre: Police Procdural
Source: My thanks to Netgalley and the Publisher for an opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book.
Series: Gardiner and Renner #3

Lisa Black definitely does a deep dive into her subject, and to make it a little more interesting, throws a murder or three in, and then figures that she needs to tie everything up before her fans start to revolt. “Perish” is no different – only this time, it is in the financial world of home mortgages instead of the newspaper publishing world where her last set of bodies were found.

Ten years of crime scene work has given Maggie Gardener a unique view of the world. When called to process the body of Joanna Morehouse, her curiosity is piqued when she realizes that this woman is the CEO of Sterling Financial and has roughly $600m in her own personal bank account. Cleveland, Ohio is not usually a hot bed of murder yet each time a body shows up, her first thoughts go to Jack Renner, a homicide detective that holds Maggie’s secrets and in turn, she holds his. They are both walking a precarious tightrope that will result in each other’s demise.

Sterling Financial was a predatory lender with shady business practices. When homes are stolen and secret accounts are found, there is an endless stream of people, in both her office and the demonstrators at her front door that wanted Joanna dead. Yet there was something very personal in her killing and the deaths did not stop with her. Now three women in three days from Sterling are dead, all murdered the same way and all women have the same general appearance. Unfortunately, Maggie has the same look and Jack needs to get to her before the killer can strike again.

Lisa Black throws everything into the pot with this one and yet the ending comes up short. It reads as if the author was so determined to shine a bright light on the shenanigans of mortgage lenders that she had forgotten that there was a murderer at large and needed to hurry up and name a suspect that she had literally pulled out of thin air.

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