On my last visit to the library, I was lucky to find a Reader's Digest collection of four novels. This was the 1st novel in the collection and I finished reading it last night.
The plot can be summarized like this - it's Christmas time and four students returning home from a party late at night stumble across a body of a young woman who has been stabbed and left to die in the street. They know her as a waitress - Rosemary Duff - at the bar they frequent. She is barely alive when they find her but by the time they fetch the policeman on duty some distance away, she is dead. The four are witnesses for all intents and purposes but since they were the first on
the scene and the police are unable to make any significant progress on the case, the needle of suspicion starts moving in their direction. They endure isolation, beatings and life becomes hell.
Fast forward to 2003 - a quarter of a century has passed since Rosie's unsolved murder. The 4 students have become successful in their chosen professions, some of them even have families now. Just when all is going well for them, the cops in the old town where they used to study decide to investigate cold cases using latest forensic techniques. Rosie's son, who no-one except her own family knew existed, bursts on the scene and the first of these 4 witnesses dies - under mysterious circumstances. It is only when the second one dies that the remaining two realize that
there is a connection that ties these deaths to Rosemary's death all these years ago. And that the only way they can hope to survive is to find who killed her that night.
The crime isn't hard to crack - once you know that the paint on Rosie's cardigan must have come from a boat or a caravan that someone was painting. There is no ambiguity about motive either. But still the setting and the characters, even the language, made for a pleasant reading. I never would have thought that anyone, except for sailors and captains in pirate movies maybe, would say 'Aye' instead of 'Yes' or 'Yeah' in real life :-) I am going to definitely look out for more novels by the author.
The second novel in the collection is Trojan Odyssey - by my favorite author Clive Cussler. So no prizes for guessing that I am counting minutes, make that seconds, till I can turn to the 1st page :-)
The plot can be summarized like this - it's Christmas time and four students returning home from a party late at night stumble across a body of a young woman who has been stabbed and left to die in the street. They know her as a waitress - Rosemary Duff - at the bar they frequent. She is barely alive when they find her but by the time they fetch the policeman on duty some distance away, she is dead. The four are witnesses for all intents and purposes but since they were the first on
the scene and the police are unable to make any significant progress on the case, the needle of suspicion starts moving in their direction. They endure isolation, beatings and life becomes hell.
Fast forward to 2003 - a quarter of a century has passed since Rosie's unsolved murder. The 4 students have become successful in their chosen professions, some of them even have families now. Just when all is going well for them, the cops in the old town where they used to study decide to investigate cold cases using latest forensic techniques. Rosie's son, who no-one except her own family knew existed, bursts on the scene and the first of these 4 witnesses dies - under mysterious circumstances. It is only when the second one dies that the remaining two realize that
there is a connection that ties these deaths to Rosemary's death all these years ago. And that the only way they can hope to survive is to find who killed her that night.
The crime isn't hard to crack - once you know that the paint on Rosie's cardigan must have come from a boat or a caravan that someone was painting. There is no ambiguity about motive either. But still the setting and the characters, even the language, made for a pleasant reading. I never would have thought that anyone, except for sailors and captains in pirate movies maybe, would say 'Aye' instead of 'Yes' or 'Yeah' in real life :-) I am going to definitely look out for more novels by the author.
The second novel in the collection is Trojan Odyssey - by my favorite author Clive Cussler. So no prizes for guessing that I am counting minutes, make that seconds, till I can turn to the 1st page :-)
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