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Reviewed by Jack Magnus for Readers' Favorite
Death on Lake Michigan is a murder mystery novel written by Steven Arnett. Mike O’Brien is a reporter and assistant editor for the Gull Haven Observer. While he could have tried to get a journalist’s position at one of the big city papers, he loved Gull Haven and had his own ideas for working on a small independent paper. It’s 1973 and Spiro Agnew has been indicted in advance of the impeachment of Richard Nixon. The busy summer season is in full swing when a body is reported on Ashley Beach. O’Brien sees this as a welcome break from the somewhat dull small-town reporting he’s been doing and wonders, as he nears the beach, if it’s someone he knows. The victim, whom he did know, is Rich Mallon, who had been bludgeoned in the head before he drowned. Mallon was a party boy and suspected drug dealer in the communities along the Lake Michigan shores. While the police have no idea who murdered Mallon, O’Brien is not satisfied to leave this as an unsolved case. His editor, Pearson, is not really thrilled with the coverage of a lurid crime on his paper while Harbor festivities are ongoing, and he fears tourism may suffer as a consequence, but O’Brien can’t resist pulling on the tangled strings of this mystery to see what will come out.
Steven Arnett’s noir murder mystery, Death on Lake Michigan, is an adroit pairing of investigative sleuthing and police procedural as O’Brien and his buddy on the local police force, Detective George Dirkman of the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, work in tandem in their attempt to solve the mystery. Arnett provides plenty of red herrings to give the reader his/her own opportunities to consider the clues and guess at the culprit. The Gull Haven location is inspired and lovely, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if other readers will be as tempted to visit that little beach town as much as I was. Arnett’s Mike O’Brien is everything you’d want in a noir detective or, in this case, investigative sleuth. He’s got an eye for women and is relatively fearless in his quest for the truth. And while I did raise my eyebrows at his penchant for white wine, I’ll grant him that one idiosyncrasy. Death on Lake Michigan is highly recommended.
