"Picture Them Dead" by Brynn Bonner / Reviewed by Kimn Hinkson
Killer Nashville Book of the Day
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Brynn Bonner
Picture Them Dead is the third “whodunit” mystery from Brynn Bonner, who brings to the shelves a family mystery set in the social media age featuring duo professional genealogists, Sophreena McClure and Esme Sabatier. These two local-ladies are drawn into a bizarre mystery when detectives ask for their help.
But Sophreena and Esme’s prowess as a team is put to the test when an unidentified corpse is discovered in a glass coffin. And, as curious parties descend upon the macabre sight, soon the body of a young woman is found near the memorial and the team is pushed along into a full-scale inquiry of the history behind the house where the coffin was found and its previous owners.
A tidy writing style with courteous dialogue, Brynn Bonner’s characters teem with family flavor; even the criminals emit a sense of cloying concern. Moreover, surrounded by chaos, the protagonists manage to keep up their personal lives in spite of the crazy clutter.
Bonner depicts these women’s lives with a show of balance between maintaining romances and relations by day and exploring suspicious activity by night. For example, in connection to the case, they root out strange past activities of a primal and exotic community of youths who seem to change overnight from bohemians to mystics.
While Bonner’s supernatural undertone manifests ridiculously somehow it adds a naïve charm to the personalities of her novel while rationally keeping within the bounds of explained crime, and hinting at witchery.
This book is worth checking out.
Kimn Hinkson is like most over-caffeinated, introverted bibliophiles: indifferent to most other items on the planet. Finding that works of literature, opposed to human beings, lend their gifts absolutely free to those who brave the page, she has procured a sense of forbearance via reading in order to survive this otherwise impoverished existence. Other readers are already familiar with the pretty words they give to the most adverse, uncongenial characters. Somewhere between an insurrectionist and a mereological nihilist, Kimn is one of them.
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