Gregg Hurwitz's narrator, Drew Danner, himself a crime novelist in The Crime Writer, wakes up in a hospital room after emergency surgery, and he is not alone. Two detectives are sitting by his bed, waiting to question Danner about the dried blood under his fingernails. Danner's ex-fiancée has been brutally murdered, and the evidence incriminates Danner. The trouble is... Danner can't remember.

In this crime mystery, set in Los Angeles, the novelist-cum-suspect attempts to unravel the mystery in the only way he knows how: by writing a book as he investigates whether or not he killed his ex-fiancée even while the police continue to build a case against him, a case that gets stronger when another body is found, a woman murdered in a similar method as Danner's ex-fiancée.

The device of a writer as narrator is a hard one to pull off, but Danner is believable and captivating as Hurwitz leads us along various trails to plausible suspects, and Hurwitz brings Los Angeles itself alive as a veritable character.

My Opinion: This was a fun and engrossing story. I fingered about three or four different likely and unlikely suspects, and then vacillated between a couple of them, and so naturally one of my guesses was correct. After I put the book down, I thought that the killer, the motivation, the machinations were all just this side of contrived, but I had enjoyed reading the story -- and liked Danner as a character -- that I didn't resent it.

Recommended!

Reviewed by Lisa Miyako