Harriet Klausner's Review Archive
Ian Michaels feels he owes his meteoric rise in the business community to his boss and best friend Paul Berk. Ian wants to be the CEO of Accelenet a high speed networking company. He also wants to develop Bonds, a way of extracting data six times faster over any medium but he is frustrated when Paul vetoes his project and doesn't give him the COO position. His life becomes more than frustrated when he is knocked out in his home and finds his maid dead on his bed.
Ian has never met his part-time late maid Gwendolyn Goldberg as they conversed through notes and he thought of her as a motherly person, not realizing she was in her twenties. He goes to her funeral to pay his last respects and is immediately attracted to her sister Rowena who soon returns his affection. Never once does she believe he killed her sister even though evidence is piling up that they not only knew each other, they had an affair. Ian takes matters into his own hands and starts to investigate Gwendolyn's death because he is the police's number one suspect.
Keith Raffel has written an exciting and believable amateur sleuth murder mystery that doesn't strain the bounds of credibility like the flaw of so many books in the sub-genre. Ian questions witnesses and because he knows some of the players in the ways the police can never do, he is able to make connections that lead away from him to other viable suspects. The protagonist is a very likeable and believable character who inspires positive emotions in everyone around him including readers because he comes across as an "everyman"