DEATH PLAY

In Hyche’s thriller, wealthy widows grieving the deaths of their longtime spouses fall prey to a sophisticated ring of scammers.

When a number of middle-aged women start mysteriously turning up dead, FBI Special Agent Jemma Rhodes is tasked with finding a connection between the grisly killings before the media provokes hysteria with stories about a serial killer on the loose. Readers know straight away that the murdered women weren’t particularly savvy about managing their money and were eager to enlist the services of a professional outfit called Financial Solutions before they met their untimely ends. With its highly accessible seminars and sunny, attentive staffers (including the affable but duplicitous Kai Dante), Financial Solutions appears to offer the kind of professional guidance the women needed after their husbands had shuffled off this mortal coil. What both the FBI and readers don’t immediately understand is why the scammers—who manage to walk away with over $12 million in under a year—would knock off their marks when they didn’t have to resort to murder. Rhodes surmises that the FBI is dealing with genius-level intelligence, along with an outsize ego. Hyche maintains a cool and methodical pace every bit as steady as the killers themselves. Uncertainty and expectation stalk every encounter in which the killer or killers might be afoot. When the author reports, in ostensibly bland terms, “She checked her appearance one more time and then picked up her phone and headed toward the kitchen in search of her purse, keys, and grocery list. Finding it all, she left through the garage door,” keyed-up readers will fear the woman will never return through that door again. While Hyche keeps the suspense taught, the forensic nature of the narrative does threaten to chill the proceedings to an uncomfortable degree. On the other hand, the anguish the survivors feel as they look to returning hero Jemma Rhodes for answers packs a genuine sense of human emotion that’s hard to shake off after the final page is turned.

A finely crafted game of cat and mouse with deadly consequences.