Review: Three McRyans for the Price of One
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 29, 2014
What's better than a complex thriller featuring an exceptionally clever detective? How about three thrillers featuring that same detective for the price of one? Roger Stelljes gives readers a triple dose of St. Paul's sharpest detective, Mac McRyan, at a bargain price.McRyan is descended from a family of cops and turned down a lucrative career as an attorney to become one of St. Paul's youngest detectives. He's also exceptionally observant and great at picking through the details in a tough case in order to solve it.This book contains two McRyan novels and a prequel novella.First Case (novella): McRyan is a rookie detective here. Along with his partner Dick Lich (one of the great double entendre character names... and yes the other cops do poke good natured fun at him for that reason), McRyan has to solve his first murder case. An attorney at a prominent local law firm has been beaten to death in a bar parking lot. The man was a habitual womanizer and there are plenty of jealous husbands and boyfriends as potential suspects. This novella was actually written after the two novels featured in this collection.The St. Paul Conspiracy: A popular local reporter is murdered and the chief suspect is her boyfriend, a United States Senator who apparently commits suicide out of guilt and remorse. After investigating that case, McRyan winds up helping in the investigation of another major case, a serial killer preying on women in the Twin Cities area. McRyan helps catch the serial killer, but he soon realizes that both cases have a lot of loose ends and are actually part of a massive conspiracy involving a large multinational corporation.Deadly Stillwater: The crimes are a bit more down-to-earth in this novel. The college age daughters of the St. Paul police chief and a powerful attorney are kidnapped by a team of well organized, highly competent kidnappers. Although the kidnappers demand a ransom, McRyan suspects that they may actually have a more personal motive for the kidnappings.The three books share many strengths. Stelljes is very knowledgeable about police procedure, and the crime solving techniques described in the book seem quite authentic. Even better is the dialogue among the cops, the good natured, give-and-take kidding and camaraderie that they display towards each other. Although McRyan is obviously on an upwardly mobile career track, there's no jealousy among the others: they respect his abilities and are glad he gets the bad guys.Stelljes also gives readers in each book some insight into McRyan's thought processes, how he organizes the evidence and thinks through various theories of the case before finding something that fits. He's quite bright and observant but the books make his reasoning seem quite believable. We also get to see a good bit of his personal life, from watching his marriage break up in the first book, to meeting a new girlfriend in the second, and settling into a more comfortable relationship in the third. All the attention to detailing McRyan's character make him seem like a real, and quite likable, person, and not the prototypical collection of eccentricities often found in detective fiction.Ever since I got a Kindle last year, I've had the pleasure of being exposed to a large number of lesser known authors whose books are available on Amazon. In my view, Roger Stelljes is as good a writer as a number of the big names, including one or two whose heroes also make their homes in Minnesota. These books feature complicated, well developed plots with some exciting action sequences in the two novels, some highly competent and tough villains, and a number of entertaining supporting characters. Further, this three-book collection gives readers three very entertaining reads for little more than the normal price of any of the books separately. That's as good a bargain as you're going to find to get to read some of the better mysteries you're going to find.