Catch up with Hannah Tree when her own demons threaten to overwhelm her in this gripping new thriller.
With her inner demons threatening to overcome her Hannah begins to withdraw from her everyday life, including her detective business. She is dragged back to work when beautiful young actress, Eliza Mount, begs Hannah to save her from being murdered. At first a reluctant Hannah suspects the girl is simply playing a part. Then Eliza disappears.
Meanwhile a minor case of helping a workmate gets heavy and a new client is also threatened with death. In an instant Hannah goes from quitting her business altogether to being pulled apart by dangerous forces from all sides.
When Eliza reappears it's clear that the threat to her is part of something big and bad. Missing girls and a mysterious school send Hannah's friend, Damian, undercover, raising Hannah's stress level even more.
This time she's without the help of her mentor, Gloria, whose betrayal may well derail her completely.
The question is can she keep it together and get justice for her clients? Or will she fold under the pressure?
Catch up with Hannah Tree when her own demons threaten to overwhelm her in this gripping new thriller.
With her inner demons threatening to overcome her Hannah begins to withdraw from her everyday life, including her detective business. She is dragged back to work when beautiful young actress, Eliza Mount, begs Hannah to save her from being murdered. At first a reluctant Hannah suspects the girl is simply playing a part. Then Eliza disappears.
Meanwhile a minor case of helping a workmate gets heavy and a new client is also threatened with death. In an instant Hannah goes from quitting her business altogether to being pulled apart by dangerous forces from all sides.
When Eliza reappears it's clear that the threat to her is part of something big and bad. Missing girls and a mysterious school send Hannah's friend, Damian, undercover, raising Hannah's stress level even more.
This time she's without the help of her mentor, Gloria, whose betrayal may well derail her completely.
The question is can she keep it together and get justice for her clients? Or will she fold under the pressure?
Heavy rock was never my thing. So I blamed that for my perennial bad temper. It was really because I couldn't come to terms with discovering I was a killer. I tried to kid myself by saying that it was the choice of a rock opera theme for a drag theatre that had me on a hair trigger. But it wasn't. Even so these last dark months of the thumping music pounding into my head hadn't helped. If I did cross the line I'd claim provocation.
The last two shows had been spectacular successes and in keeping with the normal traditions of drag theatre. `Fred and Ginger' was soft and lyrical, and while the current Spanish epic was noisy, castanets and acoustic guitars were rhythmic and tuneful. My boss Gloria's experiences when she was in Spain recovering from her gender re-assignment surgery gave birth to it and I could hide my darkness behind her six-foot five frame swanning around in red frills, mantillas and flapping fans.
Amid the smiling faces and tapping feet of a chorus of dancing boys in fishnets, nobody noticed how far I'd pulled away from the everyday world. Gloria had eyed me sideways a few times but she put my surliness down to the stress and shock of nearly being killed by a psychopath.
She was right. That was at the root of it. But not the way she thought. My problem was that when I had a knife at Crispin Kennedy's throat I was going to kill him. The only thing that saved him was Gloria grabbing my hand and taking the knife. I was sure she was well aware that I was a killer and kept her council for her own reasons. But I really didn't care. I knew. I also knew that I could never talk about it to a soul.
After I was eight years old I knew that. Tell anyone your troubles and they decide what happens to you. What you want is irrelevant.
But that wasn't the only reason I kept quiet. The murderous Kennedy was a hot shot lawyer who had managed to keep some of his mates around him. He got sent down for life for the murder of a security guard, but with good behaviour could be out years earlier. Knowing the charm he could churn out even when he was planning to kill you in the next second, he'd be back on the streets in half the time.
I might need to keep my own murderous instincts well-honed because when that happened he’d come after me as sure as a mongoose kills snakes.
Contributing to my irritability too, was that because of the weeks spent dodging the deadly Kennedy, I'd had to side-line my main raison d'être. To destroy the person who had almost destroyed me. My father. Paedophile. It was the one thing that had kept me going through all the terrible years of rejection and persecution. I'd had him in my sights and lost him. He was my only failure and it rankled. Badly.
I'd shut down his child porn film operation at the Friday Night Club in Albert Park about a year before but he'd managed to slither away at the last minute. I still didn't know how but I was prepared to rip the world apart to find out. He was a powerful barrister so I reckoned he'd been sprung by some other powerful paedophiles, possibly connected to the police.
But there were no clues who it might have been. Gloria had asked and as she'd also been a powerful barrister she knew where to ask. There wasn’t even a whisper. So I had nothing on who'd got him out and even less on where he was going for his jollies. Even Nola, my ex-con offsider, and her mobster friend Sammy's broad reach across the underworld hadn't unearthed anything.
So I watched my father. And followed him. And found nothing. Rien. Nada. Nichts. Niente. The problem was that it was costing me money. No nice cheques from little old ladies gratefully forking out money for my help. I was my own client. Nola warned me I could go broke. That I should stick to chasing errant husbands and missing persons. Nevertheless she'd gone along with sharing the surveillance until one day she got fed up.
`Surveillance my arse,' she said. `It's fuckin' stalkin'. And it's fuckin' illegal. I told ya right at the beginnin', nothin' illegal. I done me time and I won't never go back inside for nobody, even you. Yez are stupid if ya think you'll get `im, too. `E's too smart. They all are. Ask Sammy. `E's been trying' to get the bastard what did for `is girl for years. Nothin'. If ya keep this up you'll get busted and ya can bet a prick like him'll have yez inside in nothin' flat. So cool it, Hannah.'
That explained something I'd wondered about. I thought Sammy's hatred of paedophiles was personal but didn't know why. He had a little shrine in his hall with a child's picture over it, but of course I couldn't ask. In our world, you never did.
Nola didn't know about my newly discovered lethal impulses and I didn't know whether I'd succumb to them if I had my father in my sights. Was he more or less deserving of being killed than Crispin Kennedy? To me, probably more. But I didn't think I’d feel too guilty about it if I did. I might even get away with it. There's not a lot of sympathy around for paedophiles.
Because of all that old stuff I didn't see this bloody `rock' shit looming. When I finally did notice it was too late. Kevin, our designer, was having orgasms over the wild costumes he'd create for some kind of combination of Superstar, Hair and The Rocky Horror Show all wrapped up in Ziggy Stardust. Nothing would stop it now.
I went to bed cross and woke up cross. Every day was shittier than the last. Apart from the surveillance, my business and even my love life were on hold. Once again I'd pissed off Nick, my sometime boyfriend. He was still on about me giving up my detective business and his rabbiting on about the danger had me revved up to almost eruption. It was a long-term sore point between us and given my current mood it was amazing we were still speaking at all.
I didn't deny there was danger. Since I'd started this detecting thing I'd been sexually assaulted, stabbed, kidnapped and held hostage. But justice was what I did. In every case I'd got it for the people I worked for. We'd shut down the place where a paedophile ring and sadistic sex, up to and including murder were going on. And brought down the organ thieves who'd preyed on street kids.
Celia, the artist whose ex I'd wanted to kill, was in England catching up with her stalled career. Dawn, my first proper client who paid me, was flitting around the Italian riviera with her new man, and my very first was playing house with her recently acquired husband, the only straight man in our drag show.
It was because of all the physical injuries I'd had, that since the Kennedy case ended I'd been wondering about continuing with the business. With my father protected by other powerful paedophiles there was no justice for me so why the fuck should I bother risking my life chasing it for others? Justice had always been what motivated me but I didn't have any cases anyway.
I think I'd have walked away except for two things. First, Nola. Where else would she get a job with her record? And second, the hope that there could be money in it down the track. There was one potential client. An old woman with a daughter-in-law problem. I'd only spoken to her once and if I decided to shut up shop never would again.
My final decision came over wheels. I'd had issues with Nola over the business car but I was deep inside myself over the killer thing so I wasn't too diplomatic about it and she made threats about moving on. We'd fallen out before but had always sorted things out. Usually I grovelled. This time I couldn't get any lower so I got myself alternative wheels. A motorbike.
It was the only thing that made me smile back then. I'd always wanted one. I bought a second-hand black Kawasaki Eliminator VN250 and a set of black motorcycle leathers. I didn't tell anyone. I just rocked up at the theatre car park looking like the Terminator on steroids.
It went down brilliantly with the lads who all agreed I really looked the part for my nickname, Hardarse Hannah. Gloria rolled her eyes like an old momma but laughed and said I was the butchest person in the car park. Everyone roared when I said that wasn't hard.
I called it the `growler' and after Nola checked it out thoroughly, she said, ` Don't expect me to scrape yez off the road when ya come off it, will ya?’
It didn't go down at all well with Nick. Apart from his belief I was looking for trouble he felt that his opinion, namely him, meant nothing to me. I’d flipped him the bird and walked out. I occasionally mused that Nola was more important to me than Nick. I needed her underworld contacts for the business as well as for our underlying rapport. As society's rejects we were kin. Nick, from his upper middle-class background would never understand that.
I first met Nola when we shared a cell. She was at the end of a long sentence for killing her abusive husband. I was there for a few weeks. But something clicked between us. It was my first time in an adult prison but I'd felt comfortable there. Maybe it was being safe. A roof over my head, no more fighting for a spot in a squat, or a sleazy boarding house. I suspect a lot of people like me who'd come from Juvie onto the streets with nowhere to go, might see jail as a second home.
In fact, if I hadn't met Gloria, I might have been one of them. Not that Nola and I ever talked about any of that. You didn't. We understood each other.
I looked her up after I was stabbed the first time. The police weren’t interested in trying to track down the crook who'd done it. I was a crook too, so who cared. So I decided I would use a crook to catch a crook and she did. We’d been a team ever since.
Memory lane had so effectively shut out the cacophony that was messing with my brain that I didn't realise it had stopped until my phone's racket had taken its place. It was an unknown number. I don't always take them but business was even less than ordinary right then and you never knew. I opened my mouth to speak but was stopped right there.
`Is that Hannah Tree?' a child's voice whispered.
`Yes…who—'
`Please help me. Somebody's trying to kill me.'
Come Sunrise, book 3 in the Hannah Tree Detective Series has three times the cases and three times the action. Hannah is evolving as a private detective. But more importantly, as a person she is beginning to interact with the people she cares about without putting up quite as many walls. She remains a work in progress, but aren’t we all?
Working a case about a missing son – one that is grown up – is tedious, but it helps Hannah pay the bills. Beryl Edgar has a son that is under the care of a domineering daughter-in-law. With all of her money, Ms. Edgar has not been able to contact her son and is worried about him. In her defense, he is mentally unable to be left to his own devises, and she just wants to verify that he is okay. Little does Hannah know this seemingly simple case of a missing person will end up a twisted tale that no one could have predicted.
While working for Ms. Edgar, Hannah receives a phone call from a young girl stating someone is trying to kill her. Hannah thinks it is a hoax. The girl, who is an actress, turns up at Hannah’s apartment, and confirms the fact that someone killed her mother and is now trying to murder her. Hannah is anything but a softy, but she cannot allow someone to kill this innocent girl. So begins the dark journey into an acting school that is teaching much more than the young people there need to know.
All the while those cases are twisting and turning, Gary, one of the guys working at the club, is being stalked. At first it is just irritating, but when the stalker becomes violent, Hannah ramps up her investigation. It appears that stalker may have auditioned for the club, but was not hired. This hardly seems like motive for violence. But what kind of person attacks not only people but shaves a cat?
All three of these cases intermingle in the most devious way, much to the delight of the readers. The characters come to life in the pages and the storylines twist and turn while keeping up the fast-paced action. I love a novel that surprises me, and this one did more than once. I highly recommend reading this book as well as the others in the series. It works well as a standalone novel, but I like the depth of the characters that comes from reading the story from the first book.
Author D M MacDonald is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors, joining the ranks of those writing interestingly twisted tales that are easy to read, yet unforgettable once finished. I cannot wait for the next book in this series.
DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: I have a material connection because I received a review copy for free from Reedsy Discovery in exchange for a fair and honest review.
Copyright © 2022 Laura Hartman