It’s a Mystery: “Never met a sacred cow he didn’t want to slay”
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Death in the Family
By Tessa Wegert
Berkley, 2020
Here we have murder, madness and megalomania among the high and mighty. A family gathering on their storm-swept private island, a blood-soaked bed, a missing heir, a creepy manservant—it’s definitely a setting that owes a large nod to Agatha Christie. (Specifically, her Murder for Christmas, which was originally published in 1938 as Hercule Poirot’s Christmas and incorporates the two traditional themes of the house-party and the locked-room murder.)
Death in the Family opens with a prologue detailing the former NYPD homicide detective Shana Merchant’s traumatic past. She barely survived being abducted by a serial killer. That was thirteen months ago. Now she’s a Senior Investigator in the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in the Thousand Islands region. As a nor’easter bears down on her new territory, Shana and her partner, Tim Wellington, respond to a missing-persons report. Jasper Sinclair, the scion of the prominent Sinclair family and heir to Sinclair Textiles, has vanished from a clan reunion on their private island in the region, Tern.
Shana and Tim travel to the remote island to find a Sinclair assemblage that includes Jasper’s grandmother, Camilla, his siblings and their significant others, and Norton, the caretaker (and all around dogsbody.) An inspection of Jasper’s bedroom reveals a bed soaked in blood. Enough to assume Jasper couldn’t have survived for long. Among the most distraught in the gathering is Jasper’s girlfriend, Abella Beaudry, who woke up to the empty, saturated bed. How she managed to sleep through the attack is but one of the questions Shana intends to ask her. Then there is the room that is locked from the inside. No one answers when Shana knocks! It turns out that the occupant of the locked room is Flynn Sinclair. He’s Jasper’s older brother and a particularly edgy gent who radiates anger. He’s also, no surprise, considered the black sheep of the family.
Once the Sinclair family is corralled altogether under Tim’s watchful eye, Shana begins solo interviews. It doesn’t take much to discover that she’s dealing with a nest of vipers with a truckload of motives. Turns out, there is plenty of financial trouble behind the wealthy façade. Not to mention enough infidelity to give rise to rampant jealousy. As the gale rages, tempers flare and Shana and Tim feel trapped with a group of people they distrust more with every passing minute. With good reason. They take a brief respite from their supervision and Abella is found strangled.
Now everyone is under suspicion—even the matriarch Camilla, who has given off some strange vibes. Shana fights to control her panicked realization that the killer has gained the upper hand.
Death in the Family is a riveting read. It’s a top notch mystery that is intricately layered to keep you in suspense until the last word. It’s a very special start to a new series whose subsequent installments, I, for one, eagerly await.
—Irma Heldman is a veteran publishing executive and book reviewer with a penchant for mysteries. One of her favorite gigs was her magazine column “On the Docket” under the pseudonym O. L. Bailey.