The Dead Sit Round in a Ring: Detective Stella Mooney #1

by David Lawrence

Overview

Detective Stella Mooney has a vicious little vodka habit and a badly shredding love-life, but mostly what she had is a case that’s driving her crazy, about four cult-members who committed ritual suicide and the thug who seems to have…come along for the ride? The plot’s a cracker, but the secret pleasure here is Stella: messy, conflicted, angry, aging, and extraordinarily interesting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937384692
Publisher:	Felony & Mayhem, LLC
Publication date:	06/16/2013
Series:	Detective Stella Mooney Series
Pages:	360
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

David Lawrence is an acclaimed poet and highly successful scriptwriter. He has just completed the second novel in the Stella Mooney series, Nothing Like the Night, which will be published soon by Thomas Dunne Books.

Editorial Reviews

David Lawrence's debut procedural, The Dead Sit around in a Ring, measures up with an interestingly flawed heroine, an English copper named Stella Mooney who has a knack for catching the most gruesome crimes on her beat, and a perspective on London that is darker and grittier than in conventional treatments. But the writing is the thing. Whether he's describing a bizarre death scene (''Four people sitting in a ring. . . . All looking inwards, all leaning slightly forward as if staring at something that lay at the center of the ring'') or observing a group of streetwalkers plying their night trade (''The lights changed to red. It was raining. They were selling sex in the rain''), Lawrence, a published poet, writes with a delicacy and restraint rare in the genre.
— The New York Times

Marilyn Stasio

Three of the four bodies sitting in a ring in a London flat are identified as elderly siblings in a suicide pact. The fourth turns out to be Jimmy Stone, a gofer for the notorious Tanner family, runner of drugs, guns, and girls. So begins Det. Sgt. Sheila Mooney's bedevilment. Dogged in her investigation of the murder, she disrupts a neighboring undercover operation and turns over another stone: the sexual exploitation of women lured from Eastern Europe by promises of visas and jobs. Nearing the breaking point at work, Sheila also has to wrestle with personal issues; haunted by nightmares of a former case, she is also torn between her longtime live-in partner, George, and freelance journalist John Delany, who can be as aggravating as he is enticing. This British import is engrossing: it's a gritty, noirish police procedural about the "near-to-the-knuckle" work done by cops who care about what they do. Another Stella Mooney mystery is hinted at, and it can't come too soon; this series is to be devoutly desired. Michele Leber, Arlington, VA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A London detective battles personal demons while unraveling a complicated crime puzzle. Police Sergeant Stella Mooney is investigating the odd death of elderly nonconformist sisters Joanna and Caroline Deever, found in their flat along with brother Conrad and another unidentified male corpse. The Deevers, all in poor health, evidently carried out a suicide pact including odd man out Jimmy Stone, a petty criminal who trafficked on the Internet in "murderabilia," souvenirs and artifacts from high-profile convicted killers, not a career likely to win friends. A fourth Deever sibling, Henry, seems to know more than he's telling, but he takes a fatal header off the building's roof before Stella can elicit any useful information. Her probe includes the seamy world surrounding Stone's business, a prostitution ring, and the London arm of the Serbian mafia. Her most colorful discovery is street hustler Billy Whizz, whose pet Barbary ape-the latest status symbol among the local underworld-tries to take a chunk out of Stella's neck. On a gentler note, Stella's lived with kindly George for over five years, though she's never told him about her vivid recurrent nightmares or about the psychiatrist she visits regularly to expunge them. Now she's pursued by Delaney, an investigative reporter bent on solving her case. Brash, complex, and beautifully written. An auspicious series debut with the compellingly flawed Stella at its heart.

Kirkus Reviews