“Dead Renegade” is author Victoria Houston’s tenth in her mystery series set in fictional Loon Lake, Wisconsin, where fly-fishing is the village’s main pastime.
Followers of the series will no doubt be eager to read this next installment, but readers new to the series are at no disadvantage, since background and characters are easily explained.
It’s a relatively small book in number of pages, but “Dead Renegade” packs a lot into its pages. It opens with retired dentist and part-time police deputy Doc Osborne stumbling across human remains rolled in a rug while rummaging through an antique shop’s storeroom.
He’s not there to shop for rugs, though; he’s helping his attorney daughter Erin locate a desk that belonged to one of her clients. The discovery shifts the story’s focus of events, and the book quickly becomes a murder and crime mystery.
This is one of several unsavory crimes that unfold in the otherwise homespun village where normally the big story is who caught the biggest fish and where it was caught.
Doc’s young granddaughter has an unsettling experience with a mysterious man while down by the lake. New neighbor “C.J.” has a brutally unhappy marriage and a series of suspicious accidents seem to target her financier husband. And a former local criminal is released from prison and may have slipped back into town. Trying to figure out how many of these events are related will keep the reader happily busy.
At the heart of the action is Doc, pulled in to help solve the cases with his lady-friend Lew Ferris, Loon Lake Police Chief.
The book isn’t quite in the “cozy” genre of mystery, since its lead character is male. Its tone isn’t particularly humorous, but it’s not a heavy-handed thriller, either (though crime details are at times rather gruesome). Generally, it’s just the right mix of mystery, budding romances, and human relations.
Bleak House Books published “Dead Renegade,” and could well attract new readers with this easy-to-read, enjoyable novel.