LAST DAY

4 stars out of 5

When I look at the sum of the parts, it was Gestalt. The individual parts, however, sometimes left a bit to be desired.

At an art gallery in a small community along the Connecticut shore, Beth Lathrop and her slightly older sister Kate lost their mother - and nearly their own lives - during a robbery at the gallery 23 years ago. Young detective Conor Reid managed to save the girls, but the gruesome circumstances left an imprint on his mind that he could never forget - nor could the sisters; their own father was convicted of masterminding the crime, which included the theft of a special painting, and he has been in prison ever since.

In the present day, Beth is running the museum, married and has a teenage daughter Sam. Her husband, Pete, helps with the gallery and has an ongoing not-so-secret affair with a young woman who subsequently gave birth to his child. Not a pleasant time for Beth and Sam, needless to say. But then, the unthinkable happens: Beth is found murdered - strangled in horrific fashion - and that special painting that was stolen and found years ago has gone missing once again. Bringing the story full circle is that Reid, now a seasoned detective, is once again assigned to the case.

It's helpful that Reid needs little when it comes to background; goodness knows he's followed the lives of Beth and Kate ever since the case 23 years ago (if it had been in any other book, I'd have called him a low-key stalker). But it comes in handy during his investigation, as does the help he gets from his Coast Guard brother, Tom. But early on, Reid has only one real suspect: Beth's lying, cheating, mean, mistreating husband, Pete, who, alas, has an unshakable alibi. So what's a detective to do?

Well, for starters, I'd suggest that someone decide what to call him. All the other characters are referred to by their first names; not so the detective, who goes by "Conor" and "Reid" when the mood strikes, I guess. Besides being a frustrating inconsistency, it actually made me wonder whether his name is Conor Reid or Reid Conor.

As the investigation moves along, readers get a glimpse of the relationship among Beth, Kate and their long-time female friends Scotty and Lulu - who call their collective selves the Compass Rose. Best buds since childhood, they shared secret after secret; but as it turns out, all four may not have been privvy to all of them, much to the disappointment of Kate, who carved a life for herself outside of the art world by becoming an in-demand private pilot and now feels left out.

All of that brings me to another frustrating aspect: an overabundance of detail, whether it be on works of art, history, or even the characters' backgrounds, quite a bit of which wasn't all that relevant to the plot. I won't call it uninteresting - I found much of it was educational, in fact - but it just seemed to overwhelm what could (should?) have been a shorter book.

Somewhere around the middle, I began to suspect the identity of Beth's killer - and that was more than enough incentive to keep me glued to the pages from then on (for the record, I was right). I admit to losing a bit of enthusiasm at the ghostly appearance of one of the characters - what the heck is that all about, I asked myself - but as I said early on, overall this is a solid effort that I'm sure will please many readers, including me. Good choice for the Amazon First Reads program!

Last Day by Luanne Rice (Thomas & Mercer, February 2020); 402 pp.