Gemma Guillory has lived in Rainier her entire life. She knows the tiny town’s ins and outs like the back of her hand, the people like they are her family, their quirks as if they were her own.
She knows her once charming town is now remembered for one reason, and one reason only. That three innocent people died. That the last stop on the Rainier Ripper’s trail of deaths fifteen years ago was her innocuous little tea shop. She knows that the consequences of catching the Ripper still haunt her policeman husband and their marriage to this day and that some of her neighbours are desperate – desperate enough to welcome a dark tourism company keen to cash in on Rainier’s reputation as the murder town.
When the tour operator is killed by a Ripper copycat on Gemma’s doorstep, the unease that has lurked quietly in the original killer’s wake turns to foreboding, and she’s drawn into the investigation. Unbeknownst to her, so is a prisoner named Lane Holland.
Gemma knows her town. She knows her people. Doesn’t she?

‘Murder Town‘ is a good thriller with a decent mystery at its heart. It’s filled with old secrets and present-day lies. It’s set in a small town that has suffered a steady decline in the fifteen years since the murders, blighting the lives of the remaining locals while also seeming to offer them their only path to survival. The suspect pool is small but interesting. Best of all, although the man convicted of the killings is in jail, another murder is committed in the same style at a time when most of the townsfolk are gathered together.

The story is told mostly from the point of view of Gemma Guillory, a lifelong resident of the town, who has a personal connection to the killings (the final victim died in her arms when she was nineteen), is (unhappily) married to a local police detective, has secrets of her own and is just starting to discover that she knows much less about her neighbours than she thought she did. As she tries to figure out who did the latest killings she has to rethink her relationship with everyone around her and re-evaluate what really happened fifteen years earlier.

I liked Gemma Guilory and I became engaged in her search for the truth, especially as it started to put her safety at risk.

If I’d read ‘Murder Town‘ without having read the first P I Lane Holland book, ‘Wake‘ first, I’d probably have settled in and enjoyed myself.

Unfortunately, I bought ‘Murder Town‘ with the hope that it would follow a similar path to ‘Wake‘ and deliver a similar emotional punch. It had a similar structure but a lesser emotional impact.

‘Wake’ was not so much a mystery novel as a story about two survivors of a trauma whose lives have been twisted out of shape in different ways by the unanswered questions surrounding the disappearance of a little girl from a sheep farm nineteen years earlier. What I liked most about it was that it was a slow-burn story where the plot twists weren’t built to shock or surprise but to deepen the reader’s engagement with the characters. 

‘Wake’ was not so much a mystery novel as a story about two survivors of a trauma whose lives have been twisted out of shape in different ways by the unanswered questions surrounding the disappearance of a little girl from a sheep farm nineteen years earlier. What I liked most about it was that it was a slow-burn story where the plot twists weren’t built to shock or surprise but to deepen the reader’s engagement with the characters. 

‘Murder Town’ is much more plot-driven and while the twists and surprises add tension and excitement, they’re not character-driven.

Like ‘Wake‘, the present-day events are driven by traumatic killings that took place fifteen years earlier and the story is told from two points of view, Gemma Guillory and Lane Holland. The biggest difference is that there is no connection and almost no interaction between Guillory and Holland and Holland’s involvement required a significant suspension of disbelief.

In ‘Murder Town‘ Lane Holland is in prison, serving time after being convicted of murder as a result of the events at the end of ‘Wake‘. This made sense. Where else would he be? What I struggled with were the plot gymnastics necessary to get him involved in this story at all.

Shelley Burr solved the problem by having Holland share a cell with the man convicted of the three killings fifteen years earlier and by giving the prison governor a personal agenda.

The upside of this approach was that I got an up close and personal view of the convicted killer and Holland’s investigation gave me access to information and perspectives that Gemma Guillory didn’t have. The downside was that Holland felt more like a plot device than a character and I found myself wondering if the novel might have worked better without him.