Crime - Literary Suspense - Mystery
Books
The Dead Woman in His Room
Pete Rangely came to Mill River to care for his uncle who was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. When Pete finds a dead woman in his hotel room, he assumes she has nothing to do with him or his uncle. He’s wrong.
In The Dead Woman in His Room, Nick Barons, a professional killer bent on personal revenge has left a trail of murder in pursuit of the fortune that his father stole from him and his mother more than 25 years ago. The last living link to his fortune is Pete’s uncle Willie Lyons a former jazz musician who has no memory of the theft, the father, or the killer.
In defense of his uncle, Pete’s only source of information is Willie’s deteriorating mind, and his only allies are a clinical social worker named Siobhan (Foxy) McFarlane and the aging residents of The High Rise Apartments, a subsidized senior housing facility in a run-down New England town. A love story emerges from the action as Pete and Foxy are thrust together in the chaotic crisis that takes place one night inside the High Rise.
This book celebrates life-sized people. They might remind you of members of your own family and friends, some of whom you know, like the characters in this story, have the courage, compassion, and natural ingenuity to successfully confront threats to the people they care about.
The Dead Woman in His Room is the first book in the Mill River Series. Start here to join Pete and Foxy and their friends from senior housing as they band together in an unconventional but highly effective team.
Hospice for Murder
When Foxy McFarlane finds a dead girl on the mountain it tears a hole in the tangled web of devotion and deceit that hides sex-trafficking, medical malpractice, and murder in the shadows behind a wall of true believers in The Doorways to Heaven Church in a blue-collar New England town.
The second book in the Mill River Series, the drama surges forward in Hospice for Murder as character-driven storylines converge to expose a sinister core group within the Doorways Board of Directors.
The heroes in this story are all life-sized people. Foxy is a clinical social worker, and Pete is a freelance writer. They are joined by a geriatric team of untrained but determined seniors‑‑widows Marge and Anna, and Bud, a blind ex-merchant marine from Trinidad--friends of Pete’s uncle Willie when he lived in the High Rise Senior Center.
Wildcards among the group are Gretchen, a homeless 75 year old schizophrenic, and Kenny Bosco, a lost soul who has lived on the streets since he was 13 and survives on petty crime and small drug deals. They zig-zag across other story lines, spreading chaos in their wake.
Retired homicide cop Dominick Petruzio has to ignore 28-years of police protocol to participate in the civilian-led investigation. The only “real” cops are Patrick, generally known as “Marge’s son the cop,” and Rick Henderson who brings marginal social skills but a genuine aptitude for technology to the investigation.
The Doorways to Heaven Church took off like a brushfire fanned by the updraft of evangelical Christianity and its unilateral promise of moral certainty. By the end of Hospice for Murder, it is clear the promise was betrayed. Crime is revealed, and uncertainty is back in Mill river.
Reviews
-
Even the killer Nick, Jr. is fully realized, the villain you love to hate with his chronically unresolved anger, glimpses into his backstory, and his recruitment of the fawning toady Kenny. The empathetic descriptions of the various settings in the broken-down New England town operate like full-drawn characters. I laughed out loud at the climactic “chase” scene at the petting zoo.
The punchy fast moving chapters open with conversational quote/titles that echo the realistic dialogue and the understated humor. I loved watching the developing “Are we?/Aren’t we?” relationship between Pete and Foxy, the frustration and tenderness of Pete’s relationship with his uncle Willie and the shifting partnerships among the High Risers as the plot’s stakes ratchet up to a satisfying resolution that makes me hope I’ll get to visit Mill River again in future books.
-
Between the hitman Nick Barons and the small collection of seniors who stood with Pete and Foxy to defend Pete’s Uncle Willie, the contrast was extreme but not black and white. There are no one-dimensional, inherently bad, or good people in this story. These are real people.
I particularly enjoyed the drama and interaction between the group from the High Rise that Pete and Foxy brought to the Sky Meadow Wildlife Farm. Each person was a story in themselves, and together they formed a surprisingly complex, vulnerable, and yet dynamic group; all with the sinister presence of danger lurking in the distance.
Watching them respond heroically, if unconventionally, when danger was in their midst that evening in the High Rise dramatizes the courage and determination of everyday people when they stand together to protect those they care about.
-
As the plot unfolds Kindley delivers fascinating glimpses of a high-flying financial scam as well as down-to-earth portraits of the senior residents of an independent living facility known simply as the High Rise: Gretchen, an artist who wraps her hair in an American flag and struggles with mental illness; Bud, a blind man who gets around with a cane; Ralph, a retired philosophy professor who suffers from schizophrenia; Gladys, a 450-pound woman who declares that “we fat people are the last of the untouchables.” All play essential parts in a breakneck effort to keep the killer from striking again.
Kindley’s descriptive powers bring his characters to life: “Marge and Anna are in their early 70s and usually dress in sweatpants and sneakers. When they sit together, as they often do at one of the picnic tables on the grounds of the High Rise, they look a little like two well-scrubbed potatoes.”
Romance also takes a turn here, with a budding affair between Pete and Foxy, a social worker at the High Rise. In the story’s climactic chase scene, they have a hurried, breathless phone exchange:
“Don’t let anything else happen before I get there,” Foxy says. “I’m serious.”
Pete almost says, “I love you.”
She almost says, “I love you, too.”
A lot is going on.
-
• How would Foxy’s finding a dead girl on the mountain lead to an investigation of the Doorways to Heaven Church?
• How would an aggressive prayer circle drive Josie from her home?
• What would happen when Gretchen realizes that Kenny has taken Pete’s Uncle Willie hostage in the abandoned mental hospital where she spent half her life as a patient?
• How would Marge, Anna and Bud’s audition for the church choir provide an opportunity for Foxy to escape certain death on the way to the Rapture Retreat?
The sense of place in this book is so real it’s almost a finely drawn character itself. It made it possible for me to accompany the characters wherever they went and see and experience what they did.
This is also a timely book that exposes the use of religious pretense to conceal greed, political manipulation, and criminal activities behind a smokescreen of false righteousness.
-
Set in the down-and-out New England factory town of Mill River, Kindley’s novel delivers a love story, a scathing satire of evangelical cults, and a tribute to everyday people doing the best they can in the face of physical and mental disabilities.
It’s also a tale of corporate greed and personal depravity played out in a hospital, a hospice, and, finally, at the “Rapture Retreat”, a prayer center being built by the Doorways to Heaven religious empire.
Kindley’s protagonist Pete Rangely is an ex-seminarian, part-time blues musician, martial arts dropout, and freelance writer. Pete’s girlfriend, Foxy McFarlane, is a brilliant clinical social worker whose insights into the criminal mind prove as effective as the guerrilla tactics she learned in her long-ago training with the Irish Republican Army. They are a couple to reckon with.
Sharp humor dots the novel in just the right places. A church attorney rarely smiles because “it takes away from his trademark look of burning intensity.” A plain-talking neighbor complains that his plumber took the day off because “God told him to visit his sister in Poughkeepsie.”
While the church secretly operates with unfathomable cruelty, its unfailingly upbeat pastor Billy Blair has a closet full of Hawaiian shirts for Sunday services. Rev. Billy has organized drifting teens into a volunteer group called the God Squad and is planning a skateboard park called the “Half Pipe to Christ”.
“Flipping upside down on a skateboard over concrete is a leap of faith they can relate to,” the gladhanding cleric tells Pete, an ardent non-believer. “We’re giving them a place to land.”
In the end, the kids are alright—but some of the town’s most powerful elders have blood on their hands.
-
Foxy and Pete’s relationship continues to deepen, enriched by time and the addition of Frankie, a rambunctious mutt who finds the first dead body, and then wiggles his way into most of the major plot twists.
Mill River’s Main Street is being propped up with new energy by The Doorways to Heaven Church, stewarded by its charismatic pastor and a townie board of directors, all of whom have secrets that unfold along a trajectory as circuitous and intriguing as the backroads and shortcuts in this sagging blue-collar town.
There is music, and food and small-town politics as delicious as a church supper pie in this absorbing second mystery by Mark Kindley which explores the everyday heroics and villainy of characters that feel as familiar as your last trip home no matter where you come from.
For characters and a sense of conflict and drama, Mark draws on his decades-long career as a feature writer and magazine editor, his personal experience as a father, son, husband, ex-husband, friend, and lover, as well as his checkered past as a truck driver, land surveyor, tree surgeon, ditch digger, lead guitarist, and hitchhiker around the world on freelance story assignments.
Mark and his wife live in a little red house in an old mill town in New England.
