Russian Brides (Sammy Greyfox Thriller, #1) by Hugh Macnab

Russian Brides by Hugh Macnab
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Homicide detective Sammy Greyfox is having a bad day, correction, SEVERAL bad days. But that doesn’t stop her from getting the job done!

Sammy Greyfox is a Native American homicide detective working for the county sheriff’s department headquartered in Naples, Florida. On her way to work one morning, she witnesses the deliberate attempt of a hit-and-run of another young native woman as she leaves the local diner, knocking her out of the way at the very last minute.

Handing the incident off to the officer on the beat, Sammy continues to the office, where she catches the case of accidental death that the medical examiner believes to be a murder in disguise. In the early hours of the morning, the much younger wife of wealthy Jon Watson called 911 to report that she’d woken to find her husband lying unresponsive at the foot of the flight of stairs from the second down to the first floor in their lavish Gulf front home. The initial onsite determination of the cause of death was a broken neck due to the fall; however, after closer examination, the medical examiner can see fingerprints on the man’s neck, and the location of the break between the C3 and C4 vertebrae would be unlikely under the particular circumstances. Suspecting foul play and recalling similar accidental deaths, he discovers at least four other cases within the county over the past three years where the neck had been broken in the very same way and contacts Sammy.

As Sammy begins to investigate, a further similarity among the cases comes to light; all the questionable deaths were of older, wealthy men married to much younger women they met in Eastern European countries such as Russia or Ukraine. When Sammy starts asking questions, she finds herself the target of a hit-and-run driver, too. Someone wants Sammy to give up her investigation, but she’s determined to get to the truth, and the more she finds out, the bigger and more complicated the entire thing becomes.

Russian Brides was an interesting and enjoyable police procedural that introduces the reader to a new detective series featuring ‘Sun and Moon’ Greyfox, AKA Samantha Greyfox. I was hooked by her story from the opening page and would have read through to the very last in one sitting if I could have gotten away with it. The story was that absorbing, and the various mysteries are solid, some with surprising resolutions that I never saw coming.

Besides the intriguing murder investigation, Sammy is experiencing personal upheavals as well, and all require some truly life-altering decisions. This woman is definitely having a BAD DAY: several bad days, in fact. However, she is strong, persistent, and smart, and she does have some good friends among her coworkers on whom she can lean when she needs a sounding board or a shoulder or a strong helping hand. And I wholeheartedly went on that ride with her as she tried to work through her various dilemmas. Readers are privy to Sammy’s internal dialogue, and it is, as appropriate, delightful, funny, entertaining, and poignant. The author has some other fun, quirky aspects worked in throughout the story that made me smile, such as her Alexa playlist used as her wake-up alarm, her relationship with her cars, and Bossy-boots.

However, my enjoyment of the book was absolutely and negatively impacted by the execution of the work and is the reason for my mid-scale rating. The story is rife with typos, changes in tense, incorrect choices between homophones (there, they’re, their, to, too), and incorrect use of apostrophes. Characters change first names or surnames: Marlene became Mellissa, Pinho became Pino. (And I wondered the entire book if the character from Brazil, Hosé, was supposed to be spelled José, the most popular boys’ name in that country.) These are all things that an editor would catch, identify, and have corrected before publication, and I am hoping that I was working from an unedited copy.

Despite the issues I had with this book, I am looking forward with great anticipation to the promised sequels, and if a reader is not bothered by these types of problems, then I say grab this book and enjoy. But I recommend this book, with reservations, for those who would enjoy a police procedural with an exceptionally engaging lead detective. This story was well worth reading.

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advanced Review Copy from Reedsy Discovery.


See my original review at Reedsy Discovery!