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5/5 Stars!
Small town life will kill you… literally!
For a boring little town, Maple Valley, Hampshire is vying for murder capital of the country.
An apparent suicide begins to take on the trappings of murder, but before ducks can be lined in a row, more deaths occur. Officer Dean Matheson dreams of earning a detective’s shield, and solving the mystery behind the woman found hanging in the woods could be his winning ticket but he needs to 1) avoid the lazy, glory-seeking detective assigned to the case, and 2) learn to keep it in his pants!
Dean, Dean, Dean! Geeze. He believes Detective Miller’s dislike for him is holding him back, but nope. Dean is holding Dean back.
Estranged from his wife because he had an affair with the medical examiner for a few months because he was needy and grieving after his brother’s suicide, (what-everrrrr, Dean) he was sizing the new prison psychiatrist up only seconds after she sat next to him at the diner’s counter. *Hard eye-roll, but holds back from flinging Kindle* So Dean, Sheila, and Beth are on my adults-behaving-badly list early into the read. Wife Linda was hiding her own sins, but Dean didn’t know that until later. However, he did react like an hypocritical ass when he found out.
Had Dean not been so single-minded… and easily manipulated, he might have solved the mystery from the woods… like I did, and this read would have been less than fifty pages! 😀 HA!
The murderer was good though, and not just in method but also persona, playing a role for all of the town, though different with each person encountered. Attention to detail was meticulous. Choosing a small, rural town was genius. The killer stays under the radar because everyone knows everyone and is in their business. Perfect. Makes me wonder exactly how long the planning took, and just how crazy is the criminally insane… crazy like a fox? And why is this killer… a killer? WOW! NICE plot twist!
Choice of most victims, unfortunately, was spot on. Their character wasn’t just questionable on some pious level, but their behavior and offenses were facts most of Maple Valley knew about so their deaths aren’t questioned at first. One is even seen as a win for the victim’s abused fourteen-year-old daughter, so who cares if they die? NICE!
As information about the serial killer—and the dead—comes to light, Dean sees the full picture, but it’s good old-fashioned police work by retired Maple Valley Detective Jones which breaks the case. Dean’s mentor and idol does the leg-work and figures it out. But will he do it before more lives are lost, including Dean’s? Loved Jones!
The spins and twists of Who Cares If They Die will keep mystery and suspense lovers turning pages right up to the end and I highly recommend it.
Enjoy!
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Did she jump or was she pushed?
It starts with the hanging woman in the Maple Valley woods; the woman with no shoes, no car and no name. On paper it’s an obvious case of suicide – but to Officer Dean Matheson, something doesn’t add up.
Then there are the other deaths, deaths that also look like suicides – but are they? The victims are all women living on the fringes of society, addicts and criminals. Who will miss them? Does anyone really care if they die?
Dean Matheson is making it his business to care, even if it means he becomes the target …
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