Book Review

By Derryll White

Lief, Katia (2013).  The Money Kill.

 This is Katia Lief’s fourth published novel.  It is very ambitious for the genre (mystery/suspense) and audience (middle-aged city dweller) it seems designed for.  Lief plays largely on emotions, particularly family and mothers.  There is a high degree of complexity in how the story unfolds, and uncertainty of the outcome.

Mac MacLeary and his wife Karin Schaeffer are former New York City police detectives who have quit and entered the private investigation field.  Their client is the second wife, Cathy Millerhausen, of an uber wealthy and nasty game player.  The field of action sprawls between Manhattan and Sardinia – neither of them places that most readers know much about.

The author keeps things moving quickly and is not hesitant about broadening the cast of characters.

This is a nail-biter for readers who love suspense. It is a challenge to determine the main murderer (there appear to be several) before the conclusion of the book.  Lief tells a good story clearly, and gives the reader detailed glimpses of several different locales and lifestyles.  In spots she is reminiscent of James Ellery.

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Excerpts from the novel:

NEW YORK – Mac leaves a message anyway, and stares out the window at the thickening traffic as they head back into the city through the Bronx.  Co-op City looms up around them in angry towers of windowed concrete, begging the usual question: Why?  Mac always thinks of master developer Robert Moses when he travels this route, and ends up thinking about all the blighted projects, his mind zeroing in on the crime statistics, poverty and desperation of those places.  Why did anyone think it was a good idea?  Didn’t they realize that creating these soulless out-of-the-way boxes would only enhance segregation and consolidate hopelessness in an already downtrodden group of people?  How was such a ruthless vision allowed to be realized on such a scale?  Whole tracts of neighborhoods were condemned for Mose’s brutal urban reinventions throughout New York.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING – Affordable housing” got society’s unsavory elements out of sight and out of mind.   Buried them alive in drab monotonous apartments they could just afford.  Left them there.  Money looked the other way as it drove by on the highway.  Moses built to slice off  neighborhoods where people could no longer safely go.  There are so many problems with that thought: Neighborhoods.  People. Safety.  So many ways to define and misinterpret all of them.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org

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