Entertaining
Mystery Novella with Something of a Paranormal Feel
Have
you ever driven by some land feature with an unusual name—dead horse creek,
lost miner’s canyon—and wondered what had happened there? The hero of Murder
Creek, journalism student Eve Sawyer did when she drove over the bridge at
Murder Creek. But for Eve, her reaction doesn’t stop with curiosity. Soon,
she’s having nightmares about the gold miners brutally murdered on the creek’s
banks in the 1800s. And sometimes, she isn’t even asleep—she’s just having
coffee at her favorite diner. But while there is a bit of a supernatural feel
to parts of the story, Eve’s investigation into the case of a girl gone missing
from that location twenty years earlier taps more into her persistence and her
ability to read people than the supernatural. In fact, all she learned about
the girl from her visions was that she might not be dead. Why did she think
that? Because the girl wasn’t among the dead men she saw wandering the banks of
the creek.
If that sounds
like an entertaining blend of amateur detective work and the paranormal, I’d
agree. Eve tackles the mystery with the straightforward zeal of youth, opening many
of her interviews with, “I need to know whatever
you can tell me about her” or the like. And while I expected that to end in
phone hang-ups and slammed doors in most cases, she got people talking. And
slowly, she uncovers facts that even the horde of crime reporters failed to
find twenty years earlier.
There
were a few, minor stretches in plausibility that were not related to the
supernatural. For example, in one case, Eve is checking twenty-year-old records
after their owner said they kept them for seven. And she finds a pivotal clue,
one that could easily have been destroyed any time in the last twenty years.
Several of the emotional reactions seemed a bit strained as well. Take the
reaction of a character that she accused of knowing the girl’s murderer: “‘Oh no, no.’ He cried out, shoulders
trembling. ‘Please don’t.’” For a man who has been hiding the truth for years,
his total meltdown after a couple of questions from a student fifteen to twenty
years his junior felt strained. Another quick developmental edit would have
helped the story. But the primary limitation of the book is its lack of
tension. Eve did receive one threatening phone call, but for most of the book,
she’s taking rides with men to lonely locales, having lunch at their home,
meeting them at night, and so on. Often, it sounded like she was on a date, not
tracking a vile criminal. And while Eve’s ESP, or whatever she has, might have
told her it was OK, it’s difficult to feel tension when the hero doesn’t show
much.
Overall,
Murder Creek is a fun, fast read with a plucky, persistent hero who may (or may
not) have some connection to the paranormal. All it needs to be a great story is
a bit more realistic tension.
See
on Amazon: https://amzn.to/39BT8lR
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