Showing posts with label Viets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Viets. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Gotta Go, by Elaine Viets

"Gotta Go," by Elaine Viets, in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, November 2015.

Sorry this review is late.  Bouchercon doth make sluggards of us all.

"If you want to be a good-looking corpse, carbon monoxide is the way to go.  Your skin is  a lovely shade of pink."

That helpful tip is the  opening line of this story, which is intended to be the first in a series about Angela Richman, Death Investigator for a Missouri county.  In this tale she is looking into the apparent suicide of a wealthy woman, found in her car in a closed garage.  The detective in charge of the case is an "errorist," a lazy cop who makes a lot of mistakes.  He wants to wrap up this obvious suicide before he goes off-shift.  Angela has a couple of hours to find evidence that the death was (surprise!) murder. 

The story is full of detail, and has a fair-play ending.