NO REASON TO LIE
By Constance Gelvin
Hard Shell Word Factory
Mystery
ISBN: 0-7599-0192-9 trade paperback
ISBN: 0-7599-0189-9 ebook
238 pages
4 3/4 suspects
Clarissa is murdered in a jealous rage. Though not the nicest person in the world, her friends and acquaintances are aghast. One of those acquaintances is Susan Crewe, who works as a secretary in the office of a private investigator. Susan has hopes of becoming a licensed P. I. Naturally, she has bragged a little among those she knows that she is doing surveillance work, her natural ability for the job and so forth.
Julian, who was a lover of Clarissa asks Susan for her help to clear him. He is sure the police are going to try to pin the murder on him. He tells Susan that he believes another former lover of both Clarissa and Susan, Nicholas, might be the murderer. Susan doesn't like to think that a man she loved, and probably still loves, could murder anyone, but she tries to find out what she can. Her apartment is ransacked which causes her to wonder if Clarissa's killer might be after her as well. Nicholas is high on her list of suspects, and she finds evidence she believes incriminates Nicholas, but still she has her doubts. She doesn't want the fact that Nicholas left her for Clarissa to cloud her judgment. Julian keeps pushing Susan to find something that will vindicate him. Also, Susan finds Julian very attractive and this may or may not confuse her thinking regarding him. Julian says that though he and Clarissa had some problems, they were still friends and were getting back together again. There are other women who will swear that neither Julian nor Nicholas could have been at the scene of the crime. If neither Nicholas nor Julian are the killers, then who is? Clarissa's own sister had reason to dislike her, for Clarissa had stolen more than one boyfriend.
Add to the mix a woman who believes she has had a romantic encounter with a creature like Big Foot up in the Colorado foothills and asks Susan to check into this. Susan is a very busy girl, who tries to placate her boss, Cy, doing mundane secretarial work, but also, in the course of surveillance work, finds a woman who has kidnaped her own child to keep him from his father. Without Cy's full blessing she continues doing her unauthorized fledgling private investigator work.
Though Susan has setbacks and must confront her own demons, which include acceptance of her parents' deaths several years earlier, she does manage to keep going, eventually finding the truth, but can she prove it?
No Reason to Lie is an engrossing story, a hard to put down book once one is into it. Constance Gelvin is to be commended for her talent and her ability to pull her readers into the story. I took the book with me while I volunteered at my library in the used book section, and customers had to rap on my desk to get my attention, so involved had I become in the story. Usually, I can scan a story and give those who enter this little bookshop my full attention, but not with this book. I really focused on it. The one thing that bothered me is that the prologue that was written in first person, and then the main story is also in first person, which confused me in the beginning, as I wondered if Susan, the heroine, could also be the killer. I'll let you sort that out for yourselves when you read the book, and I hope you will. No Reason to Lie by Constance Gelvin is a riveting tale, set in Colorado Springs. I'm familiar with the area and Ms. Gelvin has drawn a very good picture of the various locales in addition to painting a commendable picture of her characters and their psyches.
Jaye Dee Tyrack, Reviewer, Gotta Write Network
December, 2005
Copyright Jaye Dee Tyrack and GWN
