Customer Reviews

Circle of the Dead (Detective Stella Mooney Mysteries)

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First off, please no one fall for buying this in conjunction with "The Dead Sit Round in a Ring," because as far as I can tell they are the same book with different titles!

That said, this seems to be the first book in the Stella Mooney series, which is apparently considered "noir." It is very dark and Stella seems to have no light in her life or sense of humor. However, the story is compelling with a rich texture of plots, subplots and characters that will leave you guessing and turning pages until the end. The title refers to the original beginning of the hunt, which starts when four corpses are found sitting in a circle in a living room - three are suicides, but upon post-mortem examination it is discovered that the 4th one does not belong . . .

Leading into the dark underbelly of London, examining drugs, gangs, sexual slavery and murder, this is a very good thriller and I plan to follow through and read a few more - and see if Stella gets more or less screwed up as the books go by.

#1 DS Stella Mooney mystery set in London. (Also published as "The Dead Sit 'Round in a Ring.") Stella is a haunted character, a street smart rogue cop who grew up in the tough projects and has maintained her toughness. Smart enough to escalate up the promotion ladder if she wanted to, Stella elects to stay a Detective Sergeant so she can keep her fingers on the pulse of the street, keep close to the people instead of becoming a paper pusher.

I have to say that in this book, the role of DS seemed to be a lot more expansive than it is in many other British police procedurals I've read. Of course Stella tended to act impulsively at times with a lot of authority that she in reality didn't have, too. As she tries to solve the case of Jimmy Stone, killed by a professional hit man with a knife to the heart, her mental health becomes increasingly fragile as she is attacked several times, continues to drink too much and sleep too little due to nightmares about a previous case and her own miscarriage, and conflicting feelings about her live-in boyfriend George.

There wasn't really any mystery here--we knew up front who the bad guys were, the only mystery was what would happen to Stella and her sanity. For much of the book it felt like Stella was nothing but a pinball battered back and forth, bouncing off various pylons out of control. I liked Stella, but at times her whole persona was just a real drag, and her continued unwise--okay, sometimes totally stupid--decisions tended to border on being unbelievable. Dark, gritty, violent, a compelling story and interesting perspectives, the book was hard to put down--but this is not something I would want to read a bunch of back to back.