Megan wants to publicize the group and encourage membership growth and has the idea the group should research and reenact several of Amarillo’s true unsolved crimes. She enlists the reluctant help of college professor Ryan Stevens, her good friend 19 years her senior, who is the father of her best friend from childhood.

As the group prepares to reenact the Gorman case, a murder and then suicide that occurred twenty years ago and involved a wealthy family, the head of the family, grandfather Bruce Gorman, approaches Megan and asks that she investigate the unsolved crime for real.

Despite Ryan’s warnings of the dangers involved, Megan takes on the case. She confronts the Gormans about what happened that night years before, when Randy Gorman, freshly returned from his three-week honeymoon with his beloved bride, a girl from the wrong side of town, is discovered in the gazebo beside the strangled body of his wife. Randy swore his innocence and was never arrested for the murder, but he never recovered from the tragedy and not long after killed himself.

Megan’s logic tells her that a member of the surviving family and not Randy is the murderer. She is determined to get to the bottom of things, but as forewarned by Ryan, it is a hazardous path she embarks on, for the person who killed once is not shy about killing again.

Murder mysteries are one of the most popular genres of fiction writing today, which means there are a lot of mysteries novels to choose from. For me to select a book, I must like the protagonist, usually an amateur sleuth or a professional detective. I must admit, I did not like Megan Clark and Ryan Stevens.

With Ryan, there was the Icky Factor: I was repulsed by this middle-age man lusting after his daughter’s best friend and childhood playmate - I don’t care that Megan is now 26 and equally smitten with Ryan. OK, so mine is a subjective judgment, but as I said: I gotta like the protagonists.

It’s not just the age difference that bothered me. If Ryan behaved befitting his age and stature, and if he and Megan stopped being coy about their attraction and declared themselves, I would have respected them more. But as it is, I had to read through pages of his immature fumblings and near swoons whenever Megan was near.

It would have been difficult enough listening to the hormonal pantings of a teen-ager, but to have to suffer the libidinous palpitations of a 45-year-old yearning for the next glimpse of flesh, the next stolen kiss, was excruciatingly painful.

Megan is one of a species of late-20th Century fictional heroines originally spawned, I think, by John Grisham in The Pelican Brief. She is in her mid-twenties, red-haired, brilliant and luscious - like no real being ever know to mankind. Megan rides roughshod over the Murder by the Yard members and bulldozes her way through the Gorman family, on whom the patriarch unfairly unleashes her. She lacks compassion and, worse, finesse.

Come to think of it, all the characters in this book are like big kids. The book club members - each one a professional in his or her line of business - have all the time in the world to play makeup and pretend as they dress in period costumes and reenact the crimes. What adult has that kind of time?

Megan’s character, though female, and other aspects of this book are reminiscent of an earlier time, when wealthy families referred to domestic staff as “the help” and the entire clan lived under one roof, and detectives, such as Nero Wolfe or Ellery Queen, were autocratic in their methods and could actually summon all suspects to gather at one time in one room for an interrogation or the denouement.

For some reason, the author writes alternating chapters in different perspectives and different persons. The chapters narrated by Ryan are in first person singular, and those written from Megan’s perspective are in third person. I found this device annoying and disruptive to the flow of the story. The book contains lengthy retellings of several true-crime stories. These other crimes have no bearing on the resolution of the case at hand, namely the Gorman murder, and their inclusion is, once again, disruptive to the flow.

--Lillian Jackson