Shadow of Death

Rating:
Summary: Clash of World Views Makes For Great Reading
Review: Kate MacLean and Sam Morrison's easy relationship, forged by themselves to suit themselves and the needs of their work as police detectives, is in sharp contrast to the community Kate finds herself up against, alone, when a beautiful high school girl shows up dead in a bucolic state park near Seattle. The girl has no ID, but her out-of-style homemade clothes are soon traced as the uniform of a Christian school nearby. In this school and its church, things are regimented, and husbands and wives play expected roles. The lives of children are supervised every moment. Stay-at-home moms deliver their children to school and pick them up and dating is never allowed. So how did Sarah get out to die? Ministers, teachers, and parents insist it was impossible, so Sarah must have been kidnapped by one of those "whackos" of the world. This just proves they are right in being so strict. They are suspicious of Kate, a single woman in pants who is also a cop, and circle the wagons against her. How she uses her powers of observation to find the cracks in the armor is a fascinating study. So is the view of what makes a group like this church tick. Gilpatrick is sympathetic, not accusatory. MacLean likes these people, but she has a murder to solve. Tension is added by whether Sam really will quit being a detective, and office politics by male detectives who really don't want Kate around. Interesting side plots that serve as red herrings made the murderer totally opaque to me untill the end, and then completely inevitible. Do read this one.