Book Review: Where The Dead Sleep by Joshua Moehling

Acting Sheriff Ben Packard is trying to enjoy the long Labor Day weekend when a call from dispatch comes in, informing him that a fresh case has come to disrupt his day off. There’s been a homicide in one of the nicer suburban homes of Sandy Lake County, with a man shot dead in his bed.

The victim, Bill Sanderson, was pretty well known around the county as a good time guy. Bill was one of those dudes whose main preoccupations in life were drinking and partying despite being well into middle age. Someone had come through the sliding glass door of his bedroom, shot him twice and killed him. His wife Carrie had been asleep in her own bedroom upstairs. She tells the officers that she’d been awoken by a gunshot, and had come downstairs to find her husband beyond saving.

Ben spent much of his childhood in Sandy Lake but only recently moved back full time, so his staff has to fill him in on all the gossip regarding Bill’s rather sordid love life. Carrie is actually Bill’s second wife, though she had been his high school sweetheart. Scandalously, he had dumped her to marry her older sister Sherri, who had come into the trust fund their wealthy dad set up for them much earlier than Carrie had. After thirty years or so of living the high life, Bill and Sherri finally scraped the bottom of their bank accounts. They’d divorced and Bill had moved on to the sister who still had her wealth intact.

Juicy as this information is—and rich as it is in providing motive for murder—Ben knows enough to tread lightly around the feelings of the recently bereft. Still, he has to ask questions. When he asks Carrie why she’d taken Bill back, she responds:

“Have you ever been lonely, Detective?”

 

Packard looked away. He was alone most of the time. Lonely rarely but sometimes deeply. He thought of loneliness as existential, but being a loner was not something he wanted to build an identity around the way he’d seen others do. He’d decided, and reaffirmed again after moving to Sandy Lake, that the key to being alone but not lonely was to make the most of what he had and not romanticize what he didn’t. That thinking had worked for him so far. He would continue to believe it until it didn’t.

Loneliness didn’t seem to be a problem for Bill, however, who had a very wide social circle, or at least one a heck of a lot wider than the more closed off Ben’s. Trouble is, no one in this circle seems to have a real motive for murdering Bill. Sure, he was a loser, but his schemes seemed mostly harmless, until they abruptly weren’t.

The investigation is briefly put on hold when Stan Shaw, the ailing elected sheriff who hired Ben to step into his shoes, finally succumbs to cancer. He’s barely been buried when everyone and their cousin begins bugging Ben about running for sheriff himself. This is exacerbated by the town council’s decision to hold an election in November instead of allowing Ben to serve out the rest of Stan’s term. 

Ben can understand the town council’s reasoning. What he can’t understand is why so many people are so determined that he should campaign for the position:

Two things had to be true if you wanted to be sheriff: you had to want the job and you had to be electable. Packard was questionable about the first one and doubtful about the second. Why would anyone vote for the new guy in town? The new gay guy, more specifically. And why would he want to give up being a detective and take on the bureaucratic job of sheriff full time? Meetings and budgets and personnel issues, your future employment tied to the whims of the voting public.

 

No thanks.

Unexpected twists will soon have him reconsidering his stance, even as unexpected leads come to light in the Sanderson homicide. Ben’s investigations turn up more corpses, new and old, as someone becomes angry enough to fire a potshot at Ben himself. But does this attempted assassination have anything to do with Bill’s murder? Could it someho be related to the mystery Ben originally came back to Sandy Lake to solve?

When I got the chance to review this novel, I practically leapt out of my chair to say yes. I loved the first book in the series, And There He Kept Her, with its clever plot, wells of empathy and unusual hero. As I read the last few pages of this novel, I realized that my right hand was involuntarily clawing at the air, reaching already for the sequel. Where The Dead Sleeps actually improves on its predecessor, boasting even tighter writing and plotting, while losing none of its sense of humor or thoughtfulness. I can’t wait to read where Joshua Moehling brings us readers, as well as his terrific protagonist, next!