Sweet Justice Trip grew up a social outcast. With his ungainly height, everything he did drew unwelcome attention to himself. The story opens as he is receiving a beating from four high school students, delivered because he had the audacity to ask Paris Murphy, one of their girl friends to the prom. She had turned him down, but the beating ensued anyway. His reaction, as one would expect from a child, was that he would exact revenge.

Within the year, the four boys had died in a car accident and people moved on in their lives, Trip becoming a traveling salesman and Paris a cop. Their high school reunion is approaching when Bunny Pederson, walking home from a bridal reception in her peach dress, is discovered to be missing.

Her ex-husband is the likely suspect and Paris is dispatched to investigate. Since the novel details the killing of Bunny by Trip, the thought processes of the hunter and the hunted run parallel throughout the novel.

Trip is a serial killer who derives a particular satisfaction hanging around the investigation. He joins the search party for the missing Pederson. In fact, Trip “finds” the grisly finger joint belonging to Bunny in an open field. Reveling in the publicity he is garnering as a public-spirited citizen, he begins to say a little too much and Paris grows from uneasy to suspicious. Their high school background also gives her a unique point of reference.

Trip grows more and more out of hand and Murphy realizes she is becoming a target as well. This occurs while she is balancing an affair with the vestiges of her marriage. She is separated from her husband, and living apart from him on a colorful houseboat. The sex is great but living together without argument seems more than they can manage.

The author varies the breakneck investigative pacing of the book with the romantic interludes of Paris. She continues to develop the character of Paris, her department cohorts and superiors.

Trip is a mass of contradictory signals. Reared in a family that could be regarded as dysfunctional, but not gravely so, he spent his formative years centered on revenge. That this degenerates to revenge killing is at least academically logical, but I am uncertain how the random killings emerge from this.

The plot structure is tight and the story rushes to a quixotic ending. It is clear that Theresa Monsour has joined today’s ranks of leading authors in the crime thriller genre.

--Thea Davis