JUSTICE

A police detective headed for retirement tries to solve the murder of an Oscar-winning actress in Boyd’s mystery.

Less than 24 hours after Alyce Justice wins the Academy Award for Best Actress, her housekeeper finds her deadin her Los Angeles home, stabbed multiple times in the chest. Lucas Horne, an LA homicide detective set to retire in a week, is assigned the case with a partner, Mike Norelli, who’s 17 years his junior. Justice held a private party on Oscar night, and the detectives discover no signs of burglary or evidence of a struggle in her home. Her husband, famed actor Brandon Bradford, becomes the primary suspect, but there’s a major complication: He didn’t spend the night at the house on the night of the murder. To make matters worse, Justice’s sister, who attended the party that night, has also disappeared. As the investigation develops, Boyd introduces new characters to provide more angles on the case, such as BJ Larson, a seasoned journalist who’s been working on a feature about Justice for months. The quick introductions to all these players can feel overwhelming in the early sections: “Everyone who should be there was: Linda Christian, the coroner’s investigator, and her assistant; Kirk Bell, the SID criminalist, and his assistant; and Hank Alonzo, the crime scene photographer.” This tendency eases, however, once all the players and pieces are in place, and Boyd moves quickly from one chapter-ending cliffhanger to the next. As Horne digs deeper, uncovering several surprising twists, he begins to feel the accumulation of years spent investigating senseless killings. This revelation, alongside the one-last-job setup and the connections he draws between Justice and his late wife, feels a bit tacked on—a way of providing more backstory in a plot-driven narrative. Still, readers will undoubtedly stay hooked until the very end, because Boyd remains surefooted in planting red herrings and leading readers astray.

A suspenseful and layered—if somewhat overstuffed—whodunit with well-placed plot turns.