She Treads Softly: The Life and Death of Rose Doucette

Sunday, September 22, 2024

The Life and Death of Rose Doucette

The Life and Death of Rose Doucette by Harry Hunsicker
10/1/24; 320 pages
Oceanview Publishing

The Life and Death of Rose Doucette by Harry Hunsicker is a very highly recommended PI novel with serious noir undertones. I enjoyed this novel a lot!

Dallas private investigator and former police detective Dylan Fisher hasn't seen Rose Doucette, his ex-wife and a homicide detective, for three years so he is surprised when she asks him to meet her at an exclusive hotel. Rose wants him to investigate a murder that happened at the hotel. Josh Gannon, a drug dealer fresh out of prison, was shot on the grounds a few days earlier. Now it's all cleaned up and Rose has been taken her off the case claiming it was a suicide. While talking on the grounds where the body was found the two are told to leave by hotel management.

As Rose leaves, Dylan notices a car following her, so he follows both cars while trying to text Rose to warn her. Once she parks, the driver of the car shoots Rose and sets up the evidence to implicate Dylan in the crime. Now Dylan is charged with murder. The lawyer he works for, Mia, gets him released and must find out who really killed Rose. Along the way Dylan teams up with Rose’s second husband, defense attorney Tito Mullins to solve the murder.

The Life and Death of Rose Doucette is a well-written, fast-paced, compelling investigative novel that is full of secrets and surprises as the progressively dangerous investigation unfolds. Since Rose's murder happens early in the novel, a sense of urgency and danger is immediately present and is followed by increasingly tense situations and twists. The underlying mystery that needs to be solved becomes more complex as the risks increase.

The narrative unfold through Dylan's first person account, which works quite well and helps create the noir atmosphere in the mystery. Dylan is a fully realized character with a great personality. The rest of the cast of characters are realistic, varied, and unique in the novel. As the narrative continues Rose's backstory brings her to life.

This is an engrossing mystery that held my complete attention right up to the surprising twist at the end. Thanks to Oceanview Publishing for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

No comments:

Post a Comment

John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.