The Suicide House

 I’ve continued my binge reading and listening to murder mysteries by Charlie Donlea. There may be only two books left that are available in audio format. My last read was The Suicide House, a story that takes place at a successful high school college prep boarding program. The campus is large and beautiful, and the teachers also lived on campus in a building that provided them with privacy from the students. However, when a train track was built to support a local mining operation, the teachers’ house became undesirable due to the constant noise. But when that structure was abandoned, it became the favorite place for students to use when they wanted to get away from the very strict rules that were a part of their academic program. Party on!

 

But then there was a series of deaths in the old teachers’ house and on the nearby railroad tracks. In the second book in the Rory Moore/Lane Phillips, Donlea further developed those characters. It was Rory who had a unique expertise in recreating murder scenes from cold case unsolved crimes. Lane was the one person in the world who understood this obsessional and autistic woman. His support allowed her to do her thing. She simply saw clues that others had missed.

 

This is a good plot and I appreciated learning more about the protagonists. Perhaps this book is not great literature, but it is captivating none-the-less. If this is your genre, you should get to know Charlie Donlea.

The Widow

 The Widow is a John Grisham novel. I think we’ve read and reviewed most of Grisham’s novels and he has generally gotten high praise, if not outright ravings regarding his characters and plots. In this story, an elderly widow, Ms. Eleanor Barnett, walked into a lawyer’s small office with a request to rewrite her will. She had done this recently with another lawyer in the same small town, but she had grown to distrust that guy. In fact, when it seemed she was a woman of great wealth, the lawyer wrote a clause to grant himself a near half-million dollar cash gift at the time of the widow’s death. Simon Latch, the new attorney, had seen his practice slide toward bankruptcy, in part because of his failed marriage, but also because of his gambling debts. The widow’s husband had apparently led a frugal life and left her with about $20,000,000 in stocks for Coca-Cola and WalMart.

 

Desperate to find a way to avoid his own financial demise, Simon agreed to take the case at a rather high fee for the work he would do, and he then avoided thoroughly vetting his client when she did not produce the usual documents with regard to her assets. He was afraid that if he pressed her for the information, that she would just take her estate matters to another attorney. She began to take up more and more of Simon’s time, but he kept on with the expenses that Ms. Barnett was accruing with a promise of a huge payout from her estate. Then she became ill, was hospitalized, and then died quickly under suspicious circumstances. All guilty motives pointed toward Simon.

 

I would rate this as an interesting book, but it’s not one which held my interest to the extent that most of his others have done. I don’t think this novel is Grisham’s best work.