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LET'S SAY JACK KENNEDY KILLED THE GIRL  by William    Crandell

LET'S SAY JACK KENNEDY KILLED THE GIRL

Jack Griffin Detective Series Book 1

by William Crandell

Pub Date: Nov. 19th, 2021
Publisher: Hawkshaw Press

In Crandell’s novel, a detective is hired by Jack Kennedy, a young congressman, to protect him from charges of murder.

Private eye Jack Griffin meets Jack Kennedy at a dinner hosted by the Army and Navy Club and finds a supremely charming man with a ribald humor. Both men are quickly infatuated with Betty Dyson, a beautiful, flirtatious woman, but Kennedy is the one who takes her home. The next day she’s discovered murdered—savagely beaten, stabbed, and maybe raped. Kennedy immediately hires Griffin to conduct an investigation of his own. He claims to be innocent, and he’s worried what even the rumor of a lurid crime would do to his political career, especially as a congressman representing a Catholic district. Griffin believes in his innocence, if only for the moment, and agrees to examine the case, partly motivated by anger that a woman he admired could be so unjustly treated. The pressure to solve the case quickly is enormous—Betty worked for Stuart Symington, the assistant secretary of war, and was married to Col. Don Dyson, a war hero and “famous fighter ace.” Given all those involved and the gruesome nature of the murder, the case is sure to garner national media attention. Crandell crafts not only a tantalizingly complex crime—one with conspiratorial proportions—but also deftly limns an atmosphere of gloomy transgression and a dark world of crime and subterfuge. His writing, however, can be read as overwrought or good, campy fun; consider Griffin’s warning to a dirty cop: “Make one wrong move, and I’ll blow a tunnel in you they can use to drive cars through from Annapolis to the Eastern Shore, beach traffic through one side and westbound back through the other.” For all its literary limitations, including its tendency to reproduce the tropes of a well-worn genre, this is a captivating read intelligently rendered.

A thrilling crime drama, suspenseful and thoughtful.