For the first five installments of Jane Rubino's Cat Austen/Victor Cardenas series, we have been lead to believe that Cat's policeman-husband had been the victim of a random shooting. In the opening chapter of "Raise the Dead" we flashback to the sinister meeting to plot the killing of Christopher Austen.
Click here to see the rest of this review...
The present-day story begins on a holiday weekend at the Jersey Shore. Cat Austen is getting ready for the wedding of her brother to her best friend, when the violent death of a rival reporter seems to have a creepy connection to a series of anonymous phone calls Cat has received and to the fertility clinic where Cat and her husband had been patients. While Victor and his major crimes team track the violent man who Cat caught ransacking the reporter's house, Cat traces the phone calls to the mysterious disappearance of a clinic office worker and to the business manager who had been married to Raymond Stites, the killer of Cat's husband.
The review of this Book prepared by B. Linton
Llumina, 2004, 18.95, 237 pp.
ISBN: 1595263411
Ray Stites has six weeks to live if he fails to receive treatment; he has fourteen if he does, but he owes $50K and heath care is very expensive. He worries about how his beloved Kathleen will pay the bills he leaves behind when he receives a unique offer. If he kills three people, his debts will be paid and Kathleen will receive money to live off of. He agrees to kill a woman, a cop and himself.
Three years later in the Delaware Valley, widow reporter Cat Austen raises her two children alone. Cat overhears her lover, Cape May County Homicide Investigator Victor Cardenas, tell an associate that he loves her, wants to marry her, but must tell her the truth about her late husband Chris, a murdered cop. Stunned Cat begins making inquiries after confronting Victor who hides behind national security. She finds a tie to Kathleen Stites and the State of Art Fertility Clinic where she got pregnant, but the link to murdering Chris remains vague; Still someone wants her to back off from learning why her husband was killed. The audience learns along with Cat why Chris was murdered and whether her new love Victor was an instrument in her late husband's death.
Harriet Klausner
The review of this Book prepared by Harriet Klausner