Death Rules the Night

It is not often that a reader picks up a book and gets sucked into the story from the very beginning and held in that trance until the very end. Death Rules the Night is one of those books. Set in Annapolis, Maryland, the book starts with the story of Tom Dwyer. Tom is a truck driver and upon riding along on a new route with fellow truck driver Frank driving, they hit a woman who seems to appear out of nowhere. The two men look around and there is no one around. The lady is very dead. And so they drive off. The reader is then introduced to Mark Schwartz. Mark gets a woman named Daisy pregnant but wants nothing to do with the baby and offers minimal monetary support if he must. The reader is then introduced to Dan and Rivka who own The Olde Victorian Bookstore. And this is where the story blows wide open. You see, Dan and Rivka know Tom as their delivery guy. Tom joins a mystery writers group Dan and Rivka hold because he starts writing a book about how guilty he feels about what happened to the lady he and Frank hit that one day twenty years back. As this is going on, a copy of The Atkins Family History goes missing from the bookstore. The Atkins is a famous family in Annapolis. Dan finds out that all of the copies of the book in town are missing and decides to do a little detective work to see why someone would take all of the town’s copies of that book. What is the person trying to hide? You will be happy to know that all of the loose pieces of the story all fit nicely together in the end.

Death Rules the Night has a vibe very much similar to my favorite childhood game of Clue. The buildings are historic, the characters quirky, and all under a fog of mystery. There are so many characters and storylines that one would think it would be hard to keep up with who said what and who did what. But that is not the case in this book. The authors do a wonderful job of setting up the reader by giving a list of characters with their descriptions in the book for easy reference. The mystery writer’s club is also very interesting in that the authors give the “writers” in the group a chance to share their work. The reader gets tidbits of a few different mysteries this way. Of course, one of those mysteries is Tom’s story! So very intricately planned. From the little details to the big ones, Death Rules the Night hits all of the important points needed in a successful whodunnit book.