Monday, December 30, 2013

The Last Dead Girl by Harry Dolan


David Loogan, home inspector in Rome, New York, meets Jana Fletcher, law student, when he stops after she hits a deer with her car. He gives her a ride home and they become involved in a relationship that lasts 10 days. Then she is murdered and David becomes the prime suspect.
As the story unfolds, the story jumps back and forth in time from after Jana is killed to when she was still alive. Jana has a stalker, named K, who keeps his identity hidden until the surprising twist near the end of the story. Suspects abound from the cousins, Eli and Luke Daw, the professor who works for the Innocence Project with Jana, the Pruetts, and Poe Washburn. Washburn is responsible for putting one of the Pruetts in jail for murder when he says he hears a jailhouse confession about the man murdering his own wife. Jana feels that the case is worthy of the Innocence Project although her professor has doubts. 
Frank Moretti, Homicide Detective, lets David go for lack of evidence. David tries to convince Moretti that he is looking in the wrong places for the killer and works hard to uncover what was really going on in Jana’s life prior to the ten days David knew her.

The suspense builds as the suspects are brought forward and then eliminated by alibi or death. The story of Jana becomes more complicated as David finds out that Jana’s dreams of being trapped underground are all too real and her death is really only the tip of the iceberg to what really happened to Jana.

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