WINDY CITY DYING

Windy City Dying
by Eleanor Taylor Bland
324 pages
$13.95
St. Martin’s Minotaur-Trade Paperback
November 2003
ISBN: 0312320485
ISBN: 0312300980 - Hardback

It has to be difficult to be a black police detective in a Chicago suburb and to also be a wife and mother. Marti MacAlister has that challenge daily. To add to her daily concerns, her first husband was killed so now she has step-children and a new husband who works with the fire department as an emergency medical technician.

Windy City Dying focuses on a case that Marti works her partner, Vic, as detectives.

Beginning with the murder of a sixteen-year-old foster child in the home of a political Hispanic family, Marti and Vic are overwhelmed when a released prisoner is revengefully killing people who were even indirectly responsible for his incarceration. His purpose is to inflict pain upon the families. Unfortunately another foster child living in this home is accused of the murder and Marti has previous assisted this homeless waif and his friends a few years earlier when they were living in a library.

Ms. Bland is a gifted writer especially in the area of character development. Each person you meet in the novel has depth to their personality and is easily visualized. All of them, faults included, are what makes these delightful characters in her Marti MacAlister series so addictive for the reader.

My only concern with these novels is how does she manage to have such a wonderfully supportive family with no problems? All the children in her family are delightfully perfect while demonstrating their personal responsibility and are also extremely caring and supportive for the adults.

With the continual killing and the meeting of each victim before their demise, this is an extremely fast-paced book. The reader wants to assist the victims in the preventing their deaths. The killer seems to be very successful throughout the story in making these murders appear to be unrelated by using a variety of methods to kill his victims. The most fearful part of this book is the questioning of what if this murderer really existed. The crimes committed by the murderer could all too easily happen, and perhaps have happened before.

A concern about any series book is whether the book could be understood as a stand alone without having read previous books. Eleanor Taylor Bland successfully accomplishes this task in all of her books and each novel seems better than the previous ones.

Eleanor Taylor Bland is a delightful author with a varied life of her own, from marrying when she was fourteen-years-old to becoming an accountant. By becoming now a mystery writer she also demonstrates her obvious love of children, especially the disadvantaged ones. This is one author that as the characters evolve throughout the series, the author also becomes a loved member of the reader’s family. I’m looking forward to her next book with Marti’s family, co-workers, and friends.