Dan Waddell, Blood Atonement

Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster arrives at the scene of a particularly gruesome homicide to lead the investigation. In middle class Queens Park section of London, someone cut the throat of thirty seven year old single mom Katie Drake on the birthday of her teenage daughter who just turned fourteen years old daughter. It turns out Naomi is missing.

No motive or clues to the daughter's whereabouts surface. As hours pass with nothing, Foster and his peers begin to believe a double homicide occurred and the second corpse will be found shortly. Foster digs into the victim's past to see if a motive surfaces, but to his shock there is no Katie Drake. The Inspector asks Scotland Yard consulting genealogist Nigel Barnes to follow the limited trail. Barnes finds a link back to late Victorian England when a couple came over from the Sates and had ties to the Mormon Church. He and Foster fear further BLOOD ATONEMENT will follow.

The sequel to THE BLOOD DETECTIVE is an engaging genealogy murder mystery that is fun to follow but leave your plausibility meter parked elsewhere as the motive is over the top of Big Ben. Still following the inquiry into the history of the Mormon Church is intriguing especially Barnes' investigation as fans, which are willing to ignore believability and too much left to flukes of chance, will enjoy Dan Waddell's rotting family tree whodunit.

Harriet Klausner