A midlife crisis sends Chicago Journal reporter Mark Manning back to his Wisconsin hometown—and into a morass of lust, lies, and lethal family secrets An unexpected windfall has given burned-out Chicago journalist Mark Manning the chance to reconnect with his boyhood roots. With the blessing of h...
Well, this is, hands-down, the best novel of the entire series! A page-turner from the first chapter, this most intriguing murder mystery ends the Manning series on a wonderfully high note....and is the best-written of the seven novels.I have to admit that, at 78%, I was reading as fast as I coul...
Review of “Boy Toy”By Michael CraftFour stars“Boy Toy” is the third of what I think of as the “Dumont Novels,” and the fifth of seven in Michael Craft’s Mark Manning series of murder mysteries. Set in Dumont, Wisconsin, a fictitious small city that is nonetheless familiar to me from my one and on...
After a long and successful career as a theatre director in Manhattan, fifty-something Claire Gray succumbed to a tempting offer to establish the theatre department at the new and very well funded Desert Arts College in Palm Springs. It has proven to be an exciting opportunity for Claire but now ...
Flight DreamsBy Michael Craft4 stars“Flight Dreams,” the first of Michael Craft’s Mark Manning Mysteries was published in 1997, which is antique—last century!—in this online book review world. But Craft’s husband is a Facebook, and when he realized that I review lots of books, he asked if I knew ...
CALL it a skeptical hunch. Go ahead, call it paranoia. Whatever name best labels it, a nagging suspicion kept telling me that Dumont’s district attorney was somehow involved in the Carrol Cantrell case—if not in the murder itself, then possibly in planting the extortion note that had thwarted the...
The mourners who surround me are watching the spectacle of grief played out at the altar. With a numb sense of detachment, they mime the prescribed motions and mouth psalms about sheep, lost in their memories, as I am lost in mine. This journey, this launch of a faithful soul to its presumed rewa...
No one answered, so he punched in the keypad code. When the gate slid open, he drove onto the grounds, telling me, “Pea said I should check for him by the garage.” “What’s he doing, working on his car? He doesn’t strike me as the type.” As soon as we had pulled around to the side of the house, I ...