See Also Murder by Larry D. Sweazy, a Mysterious Review.

Review: 1964 North Dakota: Marjorie Trumaine is a professional indexer, taking manuscripts of scholarly books and painstakingly creating indexes for them for publishers in New York. When her neighbors are brutally murdered on their adjacent farm, an amulet clasped in the hand of one, the Sheriff asks Marjorie, someone he considers the smartest person in the county, to assist with the investigation, in See Also Murder, the first mystery in this series by Larry D. Sweazy.

Sheriff Hilo Jenkins knows that Marjorie is already overburdened, what with her husband, blind and paralyzed from an accident unable to assist with the farm, and foreclosure just a poor harvest away, but he really has no other clue to follow. Marjorie traces the markings on the amulet to Norse mythology, but that doesn't really get her much further to identifying why it was found on the body, and what meaning it might have. About to give up, another murder happens, this one on Marjorie's farm, the victim being the Sheriff's wife, who was seeing to the needs of Marjorie's husband while she was away researching the amulet. With danger so close at hand, Marjorie must solve the meaning of the markings before anyone else is killed.

See Also Murder is a superior murder mystery, intricately plotted, and atmospheric in its isolated rural setting. Set well before the time of computers and word processors, people like Marjorie were needed to index books manually, forced to methodically put information in a logical order, cross-referencing terms and finding relationships that might not be obvious from a straight reading of the text. She applies her unique skillset to the murder investigation, coming to a conclusion she finds nearly impossible to accept. The characters are richly drawn, the pacing of the almost lyrical narrative nearly ideal, and the whodunit element well-hidden and yet always in plain sight. Definitely one of the year's best mysteries, this series debut is not to be missed.

Acknowledgment: Seventh Street Books provided an ARC of See Also Murder for this review.

A Thousand Falling Crows
Seventh Street Books (Trade Paperback), May 2015
ISBN-13: 9781633880849; ISBN-10: 1633880842

See Also Murder

A Marjorie Trumaine Mystery by Larry D. Sweazy