Connie’s Review Mercy Street (Mercy Street Foundation, Book 1) by Mariah Stewart
Romantic Suspense released from Ballantine (Hardcover) 13 May 08
When a scandal forces Mallory Russo to quit the police department, she decides to write a true crime book. However, her heart lies in investigating the crime and she agrees to help a grandmother find her grandson who is suspected of murder and has been missing since the incident.
While checking out the crime scene she runs into the new detective who is assigned to take over the case. Together they hope to be able to bring the matter into the open and give several people some closure.
The priest where the kids go to school has a wealthy cousin who no longer has any interest in life after the loss of his wife and only child. Hoping to resolve the matter, he agrees to pay for Mallory to look into it. Mallory and the detective bring the matter to a successful conclusion, bringing closure to the wealthy cousin and giving him a new lease on life.
Mallory is a well-drawn character who became the victim of a couple of people who called themselves cops. Eventually they are found out but the damage was done. The new cop on the local police force, Charlie returns to his dying hometown only out of obligation to his family. Both of the main characters were enjoyable and figured out how to carry on when life dealt them some bad blows. I enjoyed reading this book.
Grade: B
Summary:
On a balmy spring evening, four high school seniors–three boys and a girl–enter a park in the small Pennsylvania city of Conroy. The next morning, two of the boys are found shot to death, and the girl and the third boy are gone. After three weeks with no leads and no sign of either of the two missing teenagers, the chief of police begins to wonder if they too were victims. But with no other suspects, the authorities conclude that one of these kids was the shooter.
The missing boy’s grandmother, a secretary at the local parish church, maintains his innocence. On her behalf, the parish priest, Father Kevin Burch, hires former detective Mallory Russo as a private investigator to figure out what happened in the park that night. Mallory had ended her nine-year stint with the Conroy police force some time ago after becoming a target of a smear campaign. Now a true-crime author, Mallory is surprised to receive the priest’s offer–and highly intrigued by the case. She can’t help but accept the challenge–especially when she learns that her investigation will be financed by Father Burch’s cousin the reclusive billionaire Robert Magellan, a man whose own wife and infant son disappeared without a trace a year ago, a man who understands the heartache of not knowing what happened to a loved one.
Detective Charlie Wanamaker is facing another sort of tragedy. He fled Conroy years ago with no plans to return to what he considered a dying factory town–until a family emergency brought him back. Finding the situation much worse than he’d thought, he trades his job as a big-city detective for one with the Conroy police department. Assigned to the park shooting case, Charlie quickly realizes that the initial investigation left a lot of questions unanswered. Unofficially, he teams up with Mallory to uncover the truth and find the two kids, dead or alive. What Charlie and Mallory discover will take them down a twisted path that leads to an old unsolved murder–and justice for a killer with a heart of stone.
Read an excerpt.
