Author's guest post at my blog:
https://bookfare.blogspot.com/2020/02/foodfic-please-welcome-lisa-black.html

I have always like the relationship and the chemistry between Maggie and Jack...and this one started out as if that relationship would continue and perhaps even grow...AND THEN...suddenly we are bogged down in a quagmire of information about financial interests and mortgage backed securities. I found myself skipping over a lot of it. The saving grace was another murder and the chase to find the killer before he killed again...with Maggie as the possible target. ( )

I am in the mortgage business so I had a really hard time with this book. Being around it for 8 hours a day, I didn't want to spend my "off time" reading about what I do. It was too heavily focused on the financial crisis. When the story wasn't focused on the mortgage industry, the storyline was great. I love Lisa Black's books and hate to give a less than positive review. ( )

Perish by Lisa Black is a highly recommended police procedural/thriller and the third in the series featuring forensic expert Maggie Gardiner and homicide detective Jack Renner.

Joanna Moorehouse, owner and founder of Sterling Financial, is found brutally murdered in her mansion on the outskirts of Cleveland. Her body is found stabbed and gutted on the marble floors in the living room. The pristine home shows no blood trail, no fingerprints, no trace of the killer's ingress or egress from the murder scene. It also contains few clues to any personal life of Moorehouse. Is the brutal murder due to a hatred of Moorehouse, or does it have something to do with her business? And what about her overseas bank account containing an unbelievably high balance?

While Maggie is struggling with the lack of trace evidence, Detectives Jack Renner and Thomas Riley are doing their best to investigate the murder, and it appears that corrupt practices might have something to do with it. Moorehouse’s employees at Sterling Financial are all business. None of the staff were friends or interacted socially with Moorehouse. The one exception might be Jeremy Mearan, who was sleeping with her. There other suspects at Sterling itself, a crooked predatory mortgage lender where everyone is out to make huge bonuses while ignoring the group of protestors outside the building. Sterling is also about to be bought out by another company, so tension is running high at the business.

When another woman is murdered in the identical way, it becomes clear that more is going on than Maggie or the detectives realize. They need to find out why these women were murdered and who would benefit from their demise. It might be tied into the complicated and suspect practices of subprime lending and the anticipated resulting credit default by consumers, but would that be a reason to kill?

Perish features the excellent writing that I expect from Black. The plot flows smoothly; the descriptions are perfectly captured. The tension mounts incrementally as the investigation proceeds and more information is uncovered and clues are followed. Admittedly, the financial information does become a wee-bit tiring after a while, but it also provides an education on why the mortgage lending crisis of 2008 occurred and a solid basis for the investigation.

Readers of the series will know the history of Maggie Gardiner and Jack Renner. Although their background isn't completely explained here, new readers are provided with enough information to understand that there is a backstory, and comprehend the significance of their actions, and the quandary both characters face. It does mean that they will not appear to be quite as well-developed as characters if this is your introduction to them. (I felt the same starting with the second book, Unpunished, but this time I knew some of the backstory and felt more comfortable with the characters.) The investigation is solid, however, and that will please new and old fans of the series. I'm looking forward to the next novel featuring Gardiner and Renner, Suffer the Children, as clues in this one point to some major developments.

Disclosure: My review copy was courtesy of Kensington Publishing via Netgalley.
http://www.shetreadssoftly.com/2018/01/perish.html ( )

Perish by Lisa Black
Gardiner and Renner #3

Mixed feelings on this one…

Liked:
*The truce/tension between Gardiner & Renner
*The forensics
*The unraveling of the mystery

Disliked:
*The deadly dull details of finances,
*Cheating mortgage companies and corrupt people working for the company
*The final tie-in of perhaps why the serial killer was killing

This series is a good one in general but the author does like to educate and if the reader is not into what the topic being taught is they may, as I did, skip over quite a bit that does not pertain to the murder-mystery and relationship between Gardiner & Renner. In some ways I would like for the two main characters to bond or develop a relationship that is not tense but…that would take many books, I think.

Thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Books – This is my honest review.

3-4 Stars ( )