Now his brother is a suspect and his cop buddies aren’t talking. At Pat’s funeral, Ben connects with a friend from elementary school, Ellen Packler-Woods. Ellen mentions that she and Pat were working on Barwyn’s bicentennial and Pat thought Ben might have been of some help. The night Ben gets the materials from Ellen, she is found at the bottom of her basement stairs dead, police say, from a horrible accident. This second death raises an alarm with Ben, especially when he hears someone else from his past, someone else involved with the bicentennial, has committed suicide.

Ben is fully convinced these unrelated deaths are not coincidental and that they are linked and begins to look for a connection. A mislabeled newspaper photo has him thinking Pat’s murder was a mistake, and that Ellen had been the intended target all along, but the murderer saw the mismarked photo and murdered the wrong woman first. Now Ben thinks the connection may be Barwyn and elementary school and begins tracking down his classmates from Miss Cassaway’s 1972 class, looking for a link, and trying to discover who is methodically killing the classmates and wondering if he will be the next victim.

The Good and the Dead has a very eerie premise: childhood pettiness and meanness harbored into adulthood goes very much out of control. Since the story is told not only from Ben’s point of view, but the killer’s as well, a lot of tension is lost as it is easy to figure out what is happening since there are no indications that Ben has run into the killer in his adult life or during the course of his investigation.

Ben is neither a likable character nor an unlikable one. He is good at his job, is kind to his family, but other than that is a bit vague. Nancy, the woman he meets during his investigation, is hesitant to get close to Ben, and when the reason why is revealed, it is a bit dramatic, though if Nancy had owned up to her secret years ago, some of the bloodshed might have been prevented. Although there is little indication until the end that Nancy suspects her secret relates to the killings at all.

While the storyline is interesting (who doesn’t have childhood demons they would like to forget?), the flat characters and lack of tension make for a less than compelling read.

--Jennifer Monahan Winberry