The Cues

Pat Riordan's colleague Joe dies unexpectedly in hospital following a fall. He is approached by Kate, the grieving widow, at the funeral to look into the death as she feels it is suspicious due to a letter she found among his belongings. Riordan is a university lecturer who was supposed to help Joe and another colleague Phil set up a new syllabus which would involve getting students to investigate missing person cold cases. Instead, Riordan, the teacher turned amatuer sleuth, is once again drawn into the middle of a murder investigation. The connections he makes, which he comes to call the cues, take him into the dark underbelly of the college town he thought he knew and the powerful forces behind it. This is the third book in the Pat Riordan Mystery Series

About the Author :
I grew up across the street from a house where a young girl was murdered. That mystery, still unsolved to this day, drove me to work in the criminal justice system, first as a court investigator and later as a prison counselor.In between those jobs, I worked as a college speech instructor, a freelance writer, a newspaper reporter and a high school teacher. I took time-out to travel overseas, hike the Grand Canyon several times and return to school to earn three master degrees.The young girl's death decades ago also prompted me to become a "paperback writer" of mysteries.As an investigator for 15 years, I heard first-hand stories from men who committed crimes. Later, as a mental health therapist at a prison, I developed a keen ear for hard and realistic dialogue. I have written three mystery thriller novels staring amateur sleuth Pat Riordan. Book 1: "Bricked", Book 2: "The Slip Swing", and Book 3: "The Cues". Now working on my fourth novel, I also hang out a counseling shingle in my hometown of Columbia, Missouri treating persons who struggle with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Review :
What I loved about this mystery was the way the author made the characters, both main and minor, full of personality and easily identifiable. So many books make the mistake of having too many two dimensional additional headcount with very similar names and traits making them difficult to differentiate. What also stands out is the author's ability to bring to the table his knowledge of his previous experience both as a teacher and within the criminal justice system to give the plot and the characters a realistic edge. The plot is nicely merged with the character's personal lives although everything that happens eventually ties into the case at some point. Pat Riordan is a nicely developed character which probably comes from having two outings already in 'Bricked' and 'The Slip Swing'