Melissa McGinty works as a police officer at the Supreme Court, though her real dream is to get her professional detective agency off the ground. When she finds Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Oglethorpe dead on the fifth-floor basketball court, she knows she can figure out who killed him and how. But the FBI is annoyed by her intrusion onto their jurisdiction, and aren’t about to cooperate. And there are quite a few people interested in getting the once-conservative, now solidly-liberal justice off the court before some very important cases can be decided. Can she figure out the guilty party in time to serve justice and make a name for herself and her agency?
THE AMAZON DETECTIVE AGENCY is a quirky and entertaining read with an intelligent, strong-willed heroine and a political situation that seems eerily familiar without being entirely so. A contested Presidential election, a white-supremacist organization, environmental and corporate conflicts, among others, all make their case as possible motives, while some interesting twists and turns along the way keep the reader guessing until the end. The main characters – McGinty, her boyfriend, and her co-workers and allies- have colorful personalities that feel whole and three-dimensional even when we only see a bit of them in passing.
The story drags in a few places as the author goes off on brief tangents, but the plot isn’t held back too much by that. The author also harps a bit too much on the “rebellious private investigator in conflict with the official investigators” trope, and it’s a bit doubtful whether McGinty should’ve realistically gotten away with everything she does, but it’s a standard trope for a reason, and it doesn’t work too badly here. In any case, it’s a satisfying mystery whose numerous and conflicting threads are neatly woven together at the end in a pattern that at least mostly makes sense and isn’t given away too early in the story. There’s potential for a promising series here.
THE AMAZON DETECTIVE AGENCY offers an entertaining plot, a heroine with guts and heart, and a well-designed puzzle seasoned with political and personal drama.
~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader