NO BODY NO CRIME, interesting exploration of the old saw's veracity

NO BODY NO CRIME
TESS SHARPE
MCD Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Murder either bonds you or breaks you.

Rural PI Mel Tillman knows this well. She's seen her fair share of bloody cases and botched cover-ups. But killing with someone? That is a different kind of mess all together, and Mel's got real experience with it.

No one's heard from Toby Dunne since Chloe Harper's sweet sixteen party—because the birthday girl and sixteen-year-old Mel buried him so deep in the backwoods, no one's ever finding him. Mel loses little sleep over it—Toby had been terrorizing them.

What she does lose sleep over is Chloe, the girl with whom she survived that horrible night in the woods. Chloe, the girl she fell in love with. Chloe, the girl who disappeared and hasn't been seen in more than six years.

Tasked with locating Chloe by her family, Mel can't resist the call of a good chase, or finding the one who got away with her heart (and with murder). When Mel finds an armed and vigilant Chloe living off-grid in a highly booby-trapped patch of Canadian wilderness, she realizes that Chloe had been expecting someone other than her ex to come looking for her. The thing that's kept Chloe going for years is that she's kept Mel safe by running. Now, the truth must come out as they run for their lives once again.

Because when they buried Toby Dunne in the backwoods, they buried something else, too. Something Toby took. And the powerful family he stole it from? They'll do anything to get it back.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Crimes are sticky. Like blood, though obviously not all crimes are bloody, but if you've ever cleaned up after a nosebleed you know the phenomenon. The crime here is...complicated. Some people deserve to be unalived. Sometimes a crime is simply balancing the scales.

Those are the best stories to read. They ask us to distinguish among shades of grey. I prefer this to black-and-white stories more often than not. In this case, Mel and Chloe commit a crime. It's not murder, because the killing was richly deserved self-defense. It was what they did afterwards that was the crime: They tried to conceal the body. This is where stuff gets sticky. *gleeful hand-rubbing*

As a work of fiction, then, we've got seriously good stuff to work with. What works the best for me, an old cisqueer white guy, is the soul-searching the young women do together. It feels like the sorts of conversations I had with the boys I wanted to...be with...when I was that age. It's part of a narrative strategy that shifts PoVs to tell parts of the story without an omniscient narrator taking us out of the immediacy of the action...which the soulful chats stop dead. So, well, where's your personal balance point? Do you want the action before the bonding talks? I don't, so this worked for me.

What I didn't really connect with as well was the overly specific conflict between Mel and Chloe. They debate extremely small points and so I get uninvested. It's in character for people this age, but it just gets so tiresome to someone who can think "in three months this will not matter." But more importantly there are just too many voices competing for attention, which gives me a headache. Shaving it down to just Mel and Chloe, I cared more about their actions and their thoughts. Rick is funny, and a fun character, but could easily and profitably been limited to appearances within the women's PoVs.

I'd say this read is solidly executed, though not perfectly for my reading tastes. If you've watched Yellowjackets and resonate with its flow, this book will delight you. It was a solid "A" in my reading.