8 DAYS

In Selbo’s third Dee Rommel mystery, grisly murders reveal a sex-trafficking ring in placid Portland, Maine.

The third installment of Selbo’s Dee Rommel series finds the 20-something private eye and former Portland police officer, who lost half of her left leg in the line of duty, investigating the murder of Hannah Wall, a driver for local ride-hailing app WheelieMaine. The young woman was found with her throat cut in her car, which crashed and burned. Dee is drawn into the case when her assistant, Abshir Jama, asks her help for his friend Yuusuf Farax, a high school senior and fellow Somali immigrant, who witnessed the crash and then had his backpack stolen by a possible perp at the scene. The next morning, he found the word “Silence” spray-painted on his house. Dee calls on her cyber-sleuth friend, Jade, for help; she recognizes Hannah as a volunteer at a teen crisis hotline who was a victim of sex-trafficking. Jade connects Dee with the organization’s director, Nancy Camsion; however, when Dee goes to meet her, she finds Nancy’s apartment door bashed in and Nancy dead in the bathroom with a slashed throat. Yuusuf reluctantly reveals that he knew Hannah personally, and that she’d formed a support group for teens who’d participated in parties where they were offered drugs and money to have sex with anonymous strangers. Along the way, Dee compares notes with Portland police detective and longtime flame Robbie Donato, who urges her to steer clear of Hannah’s case.

Over the course of this mystery, Selbo paints an atmospheric portrait of a lived-in Portland that’s quaint on the outside but rotten on the inside. She populates it with decent people and sharp operators, hardworking immigrants, and local lowlifes redolent of “the smell of beer, pot and unwashed armpits.” Her writing is shrewd, canny, and subtle, and it’s always alive to small gradations of behavior that have serious import: “Part of my job is recognizing lies. There are lots of tells: Slight hesitation. A swallowing of words. False bravado. Not engaging in eye contact. A change in vocal tone. That’s what I’ve just heard.” In Selbo’s evocative, punchy prose, Dee comes across as a compelling and complex hero—one who’s painfully aware of her vulnerabilities but accepts them with hardboiled aplomb: “It’s the slash on her throat…that brings up the bile. My diaphragm convulses, I frantically push myself up—fast—and turn to the wall just as the yellow-ish waste projectiles from my throat and hits the tile. Shit. Now I’ve contaminated the scene.” Dee also ably discovers more puzzle pieces and persons of interest as the investigation proceeds, including Tip Flack, a squirrelly hacker and WheelieMaine’s CEO; Steph Byrne, her high school classmate who runs a high-fashion resale shop that employs troubled teens; and Steph’s slick developer boyfriend, Xavier Toomey, who immediately hits on Dee. Along the way, readers will root for her as she heads gamely toward the truth.

A knotty, suspenseful, and entertaining whodunit, mixing gritty vibes with keen energy.