Publisher: Regal Crest Enterprises
Seminal Murder is the third installment in the
Mara Gilgannon mystery series and centers around the murder of a sperm bank
director, a friend of Mara’s, but it touches on other issues as well. Mara’s former partner is going through the
heartbreak of a failed series of artificial inseminations. This gives the story a chance to talk about
what some women have to go through in their attempts to have children. There is also a young character who is trying
to find her birth father and is encountering problems because of privacy laws
protecting sperm donors, so another sub plot deals with the rights of children
to find out about their birth parents.
Finally there is an ultraconservative Christian minister and his flock
who may remind the reader of Fred Phelps and his fanatical congregation at the
Westboro Baptist Church. For a book that
isn’t very long there is a lot going on.
Mary
Vermillion does a good job of tying these different strands together to create
a cohesive story. It would be easy to
lose track of the murder with the various topics that are covered, but she
never loses sight that, for Mara, it’s about who killed her friend Dr. Grace
Everest. Some of the characters are
quirky and, at times, Mara is rather sad.
She’s supposed to be in a relationship with another woman, but she
obviously still pines after her ex-lover.
Vermillion doesn’t overplay this however. It’s a series and she has time to work out
that situation with later books. The book has a good pace and the solution to
the murder isn’t clear until the end, always a good point for a mystery.
Seminal Murder is a quick entertaining book to
read. It might help to read the first
two books in the series to have the background of the continuing characters, but
it isn’t absolutely necessary. This is
one of those books that is good for an afternoon.
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