FREE -- US & UK Kindle Edition -- Keeping Murder in the Family by John Osipowicz

Elissa Ruster is dead, and it’s an open and shut case. That is, until detective Millard Whitney begins nosing around.

The essential facts were simple: Elissa was kidnapped by Armando Lopez, who raped and killed her. But when Millard looks more closely at these “facts,” it wasn’t rape and it wasn’t murder—at least not by Armando. The problem is Armando’s already been convicted of the crime, and Millard will have to come up with some pretty strong evidence to change anyone’s mind.

Millard has no reason to even be on the case. It was way out of his territory, in fact, as far out as Cincinnati is from Philadelphia. Millard was at a regional crime conference, where instead of discussing murder someone was actually doing it—three of them in that week. The last person to be killed was one of Millard’s police friends, which pushes Millard into the case.

Relocating to Cincinnati, Millard finds that all three people murdered at the crime conference were connected to the solved Elissa Ruster murder case. As Millard jumps in, feet first, he discovers that Elissa’s dysfunctional family may be death-functional—any one of them may be a killer. For instance, there’s the Shakespearean actor of a husband, who’s currently playing Brutus and maybe taking killing a little too seriously. Also sibling rivalry comes to the front, with the victim’s own sister courting jealousy, and their mother’s brother and sister each having a strangely reclusive existence.

It seemed also that Elissa was quite liberal with her sexual favors, inviting her boss and her psychiatrist to the party, among others. Millard has to unlearn some of the values he has always thought about families. Along the way, Millard runs into a shark, Iraqi insurgents, and a mountain blizzard. If that wasn’t enough he is thrown into the Ohio River and later stabbed on a Nashville riverboat. Should he just stay away from water?

Traumatic childhood events begin working their way into the case, and Millard gets a first-hand look at abuse. The case finally hinges on the word, “Pookie,” but what does it mean? In the end, Millard learns that there’s no freedom in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, as he has to partake in a bizarre trial there, where the verdict is death.


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