Brooklyn Bones

December 17, 2012
An unconvincing sleuth mars this first in a new mystery series from Stein (Murder at the Class Reunion). In the course of a renovation of widow Erica Donato’s Brooklyn townhouse, the discovery of a young girl’s skeletal remains behind a wall upsets Erica’s 15-year-old daughter, Chris. Chris, who can’t help identifying with the dead girl (“She had her favorite music, like me, and her jewelry, and even a bear”), insists that her mother allow her to investigate the circumstances that led to the girl’s death. Chris throws a tantrum when Erica reasonably refuses, but manages to persuade her to have a family friend who’s an ex-cop follow up with the police. That request eventually leads to tragedy, and gives the single mother, a graduate student specializing in Brooklyn history, a fresh crime to solve. The implausibly naïve Erica makes suspension of disbelief difficult, and predictable plot developments don’t help.

January 15, 2013
A skeleton found in a Brooklyn row home opens a door to a past mystery and maybe a present-day killer. When overworked, underpaid grad student Erica Donato's contractor, Joe, knocks down a wall while fixing up her little Park Slope home, he finds the last thing either of them expects or wants: a small skeleton tucked into the wall. Erica's teenage daughter, Chris, feels a connection with what she dubs "our girl," perhaps since the mysterious bones are clearly those of girl close to Chris' age. When Chris starts to investigate, Erica receives a vague but menacing warning of the dangers of Chris' involvement. Instead of waiting for more specific threats, Erica takes up Uncle Rick's offer to send Chris to camp. But the detective bug takes hold of Erica in Chris' absence, and before she knows what's happening, her eye for history has her trying to understand the secret of their skeleton. The stakes get higher when someone close to her is murdered, and she comes to believe that whoever was hiding the skeleton may have something more to lose. Her search teams her up with a curmudgeonly ex-journalist who may know a little too much about the old neighborhood. Now Erica needs to make fast decisions about whom she can trust before she's in danger of her own. Although Stein (Digging Up Death, 1998, etc.) generates a few memorable exchanges between the quirkier characters, most of what happens is no more exciting than you'd expect from a week in Brooklyn.

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February 1, 2013

Renovations in their Park Slope, Brooklyn, home lead Erica Donato and her teenaged daughter, Chris, to the discovery of a skeleton in one of the walls. While the police look for clues, Erica tries to prevent Chris from getting too involved with this cold case, fearing she will be hurt. Meanwhile, Erica's research project into her neighborhood's history also starts pointing in the direction of the mysterious bones. A whirlwind of characters, from a slumlord's family to a retired reporter to the local crazy street lady, circle around Erica, and soon another death brings everything right to her doorstep. VERDICT Reaching into Brooklyn's past, this series debut by the author of Murder at the Class Reunion and Digging Up Death is sure to please those who like a little local color in their mysteries. Family ties lie at the heart of this book, and the way they are woven into the mystery will be sure to surprise.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2013
Historian and PhD candidate Erica Donato investigates at her teenage daughter Chris' insistence when a body is found in the wall of her Brooklyn fixer-upper during renovation. Both Chris and Erica are touched by the death of the young woman, and they feel the need to find out who she was and what happened to her. With Chris safely away at camp, Erica combines her sleuthing with a freelance job for a handsome, suave client, all the while continuing to prepare for an exhibit on Brooklyn's past for the local history museum. Erica enlists the help of a retired, curmudgeonly reporter, who wrote of her Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1960s, and when her research begins to uncover secrets long hidden, she is threatened, leading to the possible loss of someone near to her. Framed with the details of historical research and Brooklyn of the 1960s, this mystery also weaves in a close but volatile mother-daughter relationship that is reminiscent of Joan Hess' Claire Malloy series, although Stein's novel is not as humorous.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)