A BEACON IN THE MIST

Daley offers an arresting whodunit about a Washington, D.C., surgeon whose life is upended by a shocking murder and his own preoccupation with finding the killer.

Some people are cursed with anxiety over life’s uncertainties, and Liam O’Keefe, an accomplished surgeon, is a card-carrying member of that club. He’s right at home in the operating room, where he’s fully in control, but not so much at his actual home, where he lives with his investigative journalist wife, their three young sons, and their dog, Charlie (who’s a significant character in his own right). Not that anyone could blame O’Keefe for his anxiety: His adoptive parents perished in a car crash for which he feels responsible. It’s easy to imagine his torment when someone extremely close to him is murdered (for which he also feels responsible), and the two D.C. cops assigned to the case prove staggeringly ineffectual. The remaining two-thirds of the novel is devoted to O’Keefe’s fierce determination to expose the killer. Daley neatly slips in italicized chapters from the anonymous killer’s point of view, which truncate the list of suspects to three people, and then two. Even then, the suspense is palpable, the mystery engaging, and the characters complex and well-defined; the latter include some of O’Keefe’s old college friends, whose presence gives the story a dash of The Big Chill. Daley’s prose is mostly crisp and unadorned, although he does wax poetic about streetlights, of all things: “I can see the streetlight ahead glowing through the misty night, a beacon guiding me, pulling me forward. I think about the nights as a boy, staring out into the mist, into the uncertainty of the night at the lone streetlight. . .something I could trust that helped me gain my balance, kept me afloat in a world where I had no control.” Mystery buffs—especially those who enjoy whodunits set in urban milieus—will be thoroughly engaged as they ride shotgun on O’Keefe’s mission to bring the culprit to justice.

An engrossing and provocative mystery, told from multiple perspectives.