Diane Fanning Bite The Moon

Bite The Moon

Diane Fanning

Five Star, July 2007, $25.95, 281

ISBN 1594145490

While waiting in a fast food hamburger jaunt for her husband, a hooded gunman kills one of her students working there and then her spouse when he enters. No longer satisfied with teaching, Molly Mullet joined the police academy and is now a police officer. She is moonlighting at the dance hall Solms Halle when she hears a commotion and sees blood leaking out of a closet. When the door is opened, the body of the manager of the band performing there is found.

Before a through investigation can be made, Bobby Wiggins the janitor who is mentally challenged is jailed but Molly knows the man with the mind of a four year old is innocent. She quits her job and offers to work gratis for the defense lawyer who has her working under his private investigator's license. She receives threats warning her off the case but she continues making inquiries when another member of the band is killed. An anonymous caller places her at the crime scene and she is brought in for questioning. When a song writer who has a connection to the band is murdered Molly believes the same person killed all three men and she intends to figure out who it is; although she does not know the killer wants and needs to make her victim number four.

Molly's belief in her childhood friend and her desire to have the real killer caught makes her an independent, strong willed and pig-headed woman who somehow makes the reader care about her. At first there is a plethora of suspects because the band manager had lots of enemies but as more people are killed, the suspects are whittled away and the investigation takes off in a new direction. Dianne Fanning has written an excellent police procedural even thought her protagonist is no longer on the force as she still thinks and works like a cop.

Harriet Klausner