Customer Reviews

An Unacceptable Death (Munch Mancini Novels)

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4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

The time is 1986 - Ronald Reagan is President - Munch Mancini, the series heroine, continues to lead a clean life with her adopted daughter, and steady job as a mechanic. She happily is planning her wedding to Rico, her cop fiance, when she receives word that Rico was killed under questionable circumstances. Munch, seeking to clear Rico's name of any doubt that he was a clean officer, gets caught in a 'sting' with DEA with drug lords. Munch retains her integrity, having learned hard lessons in the past. This book comes to terms with the loss Munch and her daughter Asia feel and the process as the reason for Rico's death is solved. Very moving yet not saccharin. The series has maintained its integrity and is true to reality and characters.

People can and do change. No one knows this better than author Barbara Seranella, who worked for 20 years as a car machanic. Unless it's protagonist Munch Mancini, former heavy drug user who is now straight. She spent the first 25 years of her life on the wrong side of the law, and now she seems destined to be manipulated into helping them. An Unacceptable Death begins on a very sad note, as Munch's cop/fiance Rico is shot to death. Some people on the force are trying to get her to believe that he was a bad cop, a dealer.

This is the first Seranella novel I've sampled, and I've been most pleasantly surprised by its quality. She's a smart, talented writer who approaches crime from a different perspective, that of someone who once fell to rock bottom but now is doing the best she can to raise her adopted little girl. Munch is no PI, but she does know her way around the seamier side of LA, and her instincts are trustworthy.

Discovering what happened to fiance Rico, and why, is Munch's objective, for she knows in her bones that he was not a crooked cop. But the other players in this deadly game are interested only in forwarding their own agendas. The question remains largely unanswered until the novel's end. Seranella takes her readers along on Munch's emotional and dangerous quest, deftly avoiding the maudlin as the truth comes gradually to light.

I hate when authors kill off the major love interest. But I do appreciate when the author does it well and the protagonist's reaction is convincing. Seranella has created great characters in Munch, her daughter Ellen, with excellent and realistic interaction between the two, and Munch's friend Ellen. I particularly liked that even the villains had balance as characters. The story is well balanced well sorrow, humor, determination and tension. For me, this was one of the better books in the series.

Ex junkie, ex-con, ex prostitute Munch Mancini finally has her life together and it is a good one. She makes a decent living as an auto mechanic, has a side business as a limousine driver, totally adores her adopted daughter Asia and owns her own home. She is in love with police officer Rico Chacon and the two plans to get married very soon. Munch is not afraid to think of their future even though Rico is working undercover in a dangerous operation that he won't ever tell her about.

Word comes from her police officer friend Mace St. Josh that Rico was murdered and that she should be prepared to talk to Internal Affairs. Munch learns that his survivor pension and death benefits are up being withheld pending an investigation. The department claims that Rico in the company of two drug suppliers was shooting at police officers. Munch knows Rico was clean and she becomes a police informant to prove that Rico was working the right side of the law. This proves a dangerous position to be in because she is caught between cops with their own agendas and two Mexican drug traffickers who seek cocaine that was stolen from them.

Munch is the poster child for the bad girl turned honest citizen who obeys the laws and stays clean. Her ability to act the part of a criminal is only one of the reasons the police use her to find out what happened to Rico. She goes along with them because if she finds evidence he was a good cop, they will publicly exonerate him. Barbara Seranella has written a heart-wrenching thriller that looks at the politics behind police actions.

Harriet Klausner

#8 and final Munch Mancini mystery. Munch, now clean and sober for nine years and living a stable life with her adopted daughter Asia, is enjoying planning her wedding to police detective Rico Chacon, when he is shot to death by other cops in a drug bust gone wrong. Among allegations that Rico was a dirty cop, Munch stuffs her grief and despair to the back of her soul while she lets her practical side take over and sets out to prove that he wasn't.

She believes Rico was killed because of her--she had just learned that there is a bounty on her head, put there by the former head of an outlaw biker gang that she all but dismantled when she went straight. Now the gang is re-forming and their first order of business is to take Munch down, and she wonders if he somehow got in the middle of that. She makes deals as a confidential informant with a couple of groups of cops and then essentially does what she needs to do anyway to figure out why Rico was killed.

An excellent ending to this series, very sad and poignant, yet hopeful too. I am going to miss Munch a lot.

I hate to give a bad review to any author, but this book was so slow-moving and boring that, after repeated attempts to finish it, I finally gave up one third of the way through. Pacing of the story is very bad.