Killer Smile

Killer Smile by Lisa Scottoline            AudioBook: 10 hr. 51m    Mass Market Paperback: 448 pages                          

This is a Mary DiNunzio mystery which I was happy about.   I love the Mary DiNunzio/Rosato & Associates mysteries because it is always so fun to get to read about Mary’s family and her conversations with her friends and family is always like visiting with favorite characters, which it really is.   This story has Mary doing pro bono work for a family friend on a man’s estate that has been dead for over 40 years.    Without warning she was fired from the case.   Fired from a case she was doing for free, Mary’s curiosity got the best of her and she researches and does as much work as she would for any paid case and comes up with lots of info and lots of enemies.    All the while Mary’s boss and her best friend keep fixing her up with blind dates feeling she has been a widow long enough and now she needs to get back out there and start dating again.    Mary is so immersed in the Brandolini case however, she barely can tolerate the blind dates and does her best to find fault with each.   Her behavior borders on rude to her would be suitors but she finds the whole exercise tedious and is obsessed with finding the answers she seeks and when she learns that Italians were sent to internment camps she is flabbergasted that such a thing could take place in the U.S.A.   People who had been living in the U.S. for decades, who had raised their children here, who had given their sons to the war effort to fight and many died during the war meaning they gave the ultimate sacrifice and yet the FBI still rounded up their parents and families as potential spies for the enemies’ side.    That was news to me.    I had heard about the Japanese Internment Camps but hadn’t realized the Italians in America were interred, too, and I’m assuming the Germans were as well.   You always learn things from Lisa Scottoline novels, one of the many things I can sing her praises about.   I love Lisa Scottoline’s style of writing.    Mary DiNunzio in her research travels to Montana for answers to some of her many questions regarding the case and finds a kindred spirit there all the while learning she likes Huckleberry Pie which she thought was the title of a Mark Twain novel.   So cute and funny and serious and heart pounding at times.    The Suspense will make you wonder if Mary will stay alive until the end of the book.    What starts at as a reparations case over a man who committed suicide while detained in an internment camp has so many twists and turns and Mary champions the case of a man who has charmed her across the years from a simple photo.   She is truly on a mission in this one to get justice for this ghost she cannot ignore.   GOOD BOOK.  I highly recommend this one to Middle Schoolers on up.   Great Story and all the angles are so well thought out and I adore all the side stories, too!

 - Shirley J.