MURMURS OF INSANITY

Murder as performance art.

Moriah Dru, a former Atlanta police officer who now runs Child Trace, walks out of court and into trouble. She’s searching for Johndro Phillips, a teen whose drug dealer boss is acquitted when Johndro doesn’t testify. After Dru is shot at on her way home, she moves into the well-protected home of her lover, Atlanta homicide detective Richard Lake, who wants her to look into a problem his ex-wife’s half brother Baxter Carlisle is having. Cho Martine, a mysterious young woman whose boyfriend, Damian, is missing, has accused Baxter of stalking her. Baxter is a charming, handsome, wealthy man with a reputation for liking much younger women. Once she’s met him, though, Dru is convinced he’s no stalker. The computer wizard who works for Dru discovers that Cho is really an alias for someone who’s forged the paperwork needed to get into the University of Georgia. But her boyfriend, Damian, is all too real and all too missing. Baxter hires Dru to clear his name and tells her that Damian and Cho, whoever she is, are heavily involved in the performance art scene. So when some of Damian’s possessions turn up in weird places along an Atlanta hiking trail, Dru has to wonder if the clues are all part of an elaborate piece of performance art. Meanwhile, Dru’s search for Johndro involves her and Lake in a shootout with gang members. The bodies start to pile up as Dru struggles to discover the real reason for Damian’s disappearance.

A more polished mystery than Dru’s last case (The Devil Laughed, 2013), with some interesting insights on performance art, including debates about whether it’s art at all.