HELLO, TRANSCRIBER

Morrissey’s atmospheric suspense debut introduces a troubled female police transcriber who goes beyond her job description to solve a drug case.

Gritty Black Harbor, Wisconsin, is a small city with big-city crime, the kind of place “that not only keeps decent people just racing past on the highway but attracts criminals and seedy characters who need somewhere to hide.” Newly hired police transcriber and aspiring writer Hazel Greenlee works the night shift, transcribing incident reports. On one of her first evenings, she's horrified when her next-door neighbor Sam approaches her office and writes a message on the frosted window: "I hid a body." The finger he uses is not his own. The following night, Hazel is startled to receive a report from Investigator Nikolai Kole, who had been suspended from the force six months earlier. She learns that Sam’s confession is tied to the overdose death of a 9-year-old boy at the hands of pill pusher Tyler Krejarek. When Hazel meets the “criminally attractive” Nik, she soon gets drawn into the investigation and a steamy affair despite being married to the controlling, gun-loving Tommy. As a former police transcriber, the author writes what she knows. It’s a shame she doesn’t explore this unusual law enforcement world in further detail. What starts out as an intriguing police procedural gets sidetracked into romantic suspense (plenty of sex but not much suspense), mixed up with some marital and family drama, and topped with a bit of an unreliable narrator. The overwritten prose with its excessive use of similes doesn’t help. People’s faces are too often compared to punctuation marks (“The vulpine lady’s smile deepened, a pair of parentheses framing her lurid red lips”).

An intriguing premise, but the execution needs improvement.