There are some mystery thrillers that keep you on the edge of your seat, biting your nails and glued to the pages, although there is an element within them that doesn’t make much sense. Web of Evil is a suspenseful story that falls into that category.
In the story, Paul Grayson, who is an NBC news executive, wakes up to find himself tied up and stuffed in the trunk of a moving car. You don’t know how it got there. When the car stops moving, Grayson hears the sound of a train about to pass overhead.
At the same time, in Sedona, Arizona, Ali Reynolds to train the LA TV news anchor travels through the desert to solve two legal problems. The first is her age discrimination against the network that replaced her with a younger person. Her second dilemma is her divorce from Grayson, who preferred April Gaddis, a skinny aspiring Pilates instructor, to Reynolds. Grayson intended to marry April after her divorce from Reynolds.
As Ali Reynolds drives through the desert, he passes a shipwreck in which Grayson had died. Therefore, Ali is a widow and it is she who gets Grayson’s fortune. Grayson’s fiancee April is pregnant, but Grayson didn’t have time to change her will so that April or her unborn child are her beneficiaries.
Now that Ali had a financial motive for killing her husband, she soon becomes the prime suspect in his murder. He has three attorneys: one to handle his divorce, one to handle his dismissal claim, and the third and most visible in history Victor Angeleri, the criminal defense attorney.
Ali is not the type to listen to his lawyers and as the body count rises, the police conclude that Ali is guilty of multiple murders. However, Ali ignores Angeleri’s advice to remain silent and visits crime scenes, accidentally contaminating the evidence, becoming even more involved.
Ali is surprised to learn that the police can obtain his phone records and that detectives can read his blog on the Internet. His ignorance of police procedure is incredibly strange; In addition to being a news anchor, Ali was once investigated for killing a man in self-defense.
The plot goes round and round, but still allows the reader to bond with the heroine, despite the fact that Ali Reynolds, as the main character, does not seem smart enough to be a television reporter.
“Web of Evil” is nice, although it’s not the best of the recent mystery novels I’ve read. The main character is energetic and compelling, but a bit dense, and his relationship with his conservative mother, who runs a restaurant in Sedona, is wonderfully written. The dialogue is excellent and the desert, people and towns of Arizona are vividly represented.
Author, Judith Ann (JA) Jance is an award-winning author of horror and mystery novels. Before becoming an author, Jance worked as a school librarian on a Native American reservation. She graduated from the University of Arizona. It has three series of novels about retired Seattle police officer JP Beaumont, small-town Arizona sheriff Joanna Brady, and Diana Ladd Walker.
The book has 368 pages in hardcover with ISBN-10: 1416537074 and
ISBN-13: 978-1416537076.
The author’s writing style keeps the reader reading, despite the main character’s inexplicable ignorance of police affairs. This is a gripping suspense book good for entertainment purposes.