Book Review: Trip Wire

Reviewed By: Woodstock - RAM

Trip Wire     Amazon US PB Amazon Canada PB
Charlotte Carter
Class/Genre:   Mystery
Series: Cook County Mysteries
One World Publishers, March 2005, 175 pages

Chicago in the late 1960's could be an exhilerating place to be alive. The city could also be dangerous, seductive, and filled with unpleasant surprises. In the late months of 1968, after the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, after the calamitous Democratic National Convention held there that year, Cassandra Perry shares a spacious North Side apartment with a motley assortment of other young people. Cassandra, a young black woman, has fled her solid middle class upbringing, dropped out of college and devotes her days to scoring cheap dope.

Nothing prepares her for coming home one evening to find two of her roomates savagely murdered. The fragile veneer of the society she shared with her roommates shatters. In addition to dealing with the cruel assumptions of the investigating police officers, Cass must cope with pressure from her family to return to their protective home and must also come to terms with unpleasant truths about people she formerly thought of as friends.

Following ideas presented by her aunt and uncle, and knowing that almost no one who resided in the apartment can trust the police to treat them fairly, Cass searches herself for the truth of what happened. The many tensions of those days, centering on the dilemma of America's involvement in VietNam, provide the eventual answer to the identity of the murderer.

Woodstock - RAM

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Woodstock - RAM