Pulp Den: "A Real Page Turner! . . . Highly recommended."

Rating 5-Stars

“A Real Page Turner!”

Superintendent of Police, Amedee Mallock has turned his office into Fort Mallock. He has five assistants, which he calls his fingers: Thumb, Little Finger, Index Finger, Ring Finger, and Middle Finger. He will need his whole hand to solve the latest case. Manuel Gemoni, the younger brother of Mallock’s Little Finger has disappeared. Manuel is intelligent, a teacher, and a loving family man. When he turns up, why is he in the Dominican Republic, and why did he assassinate an old man?

Curiously, it appears to be a case of reincarnation, as Manuel tells a story of his previous life, as Jean-Francois Lafitte, a French soldier in WWII. The man he killed was an SS officer who captured and tortured the men in his unit in 1944, killing them all. Everything he tells them is revealed as fact, though all of it was secret, and Manuel could not have learned it through research. Mallock hopes the evidence of reincarnation is enough to give a jury reasonable doubt, and set Manuel free. When it doesn’t, Mallock has to look at the case again, to see if there was something he missed.

This was a fascinating mystery. All through the investigation we are led to believe it was a real case of reincarnation. The investigators dug into the background uncovering facts not known to anyone but those soldiers killed in 1944. Only until the very last does Mallock put everything aside and discovers the truth. Highly recommended.

-Tom Johnson
Detective Mystery Stories