Philadelphia Detective Vernon Brown and his buddy James McNeil solve high stakes murder mysteries
The Murder Gambit
A Brown & McNeil Murder Mystery Book 1
by Frank Lazarus
Genre: Murder Mystery, Crime Thriller
An
unexplained death in a nursing home. A man falls from a balcony. A
hit and run in the middle of a city street. An execution in a home. A
woman collapses dead after a date.
Five murders. Five methods.
Five police jurisdictions.
What's the
connection?
Philadelphia-area detectives are under pressure to
solve the murders, while dealing with their own issues.
Speeding
like the lead car at Talladega towards a shocking conclusion, is The
Murder Gambit a Shakespearean tragedy or a sinister reality?
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The Phenom
A Brown & McNeil Murder Mystery Book 2
Even
before he has played his first game in high school, it would seem
nothing can stop Bo Campbell's meteoric rise to stardom in the
basketball world. In Philadelphia, people are already comparing him
to his Overbrook High School predecessor, Wilt Chamberlain.
But
his dreams are suddenly shattered when he is arrested for the murder
of his best friend, Sherman Claxton.
Detective Vernon Brown,
and James McNeil, his friend and Bo's grandfather, search for the
truth, but James goes rogue, and soon finds himself in the dangerous
underbelly of the Philadelphia drug sub-culture, where the stakes are
high and it's hard to tell who's friend and who's foe.
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A death at a nursing home. A body that fell from the balcony. A hit-and-run. A man shot execution-style. Were all these random deaths connected?
This seemed interesting with all
these deaths. At first, we get the different stories on each case. The pace and
stamina were mild, but the read was quick and informative. That nagging
curiosity to how these cases tie together just kept gnawing at me and kept me
reading. All these deaths were odd and suspicious and it was fascinating to see
what turned up in each investigation. It seemed they were all murdered. Were
these random killings? Or were they somehow connected? The cases were a little
hard to follow, especially with all the various names thrown in there. You
often forget who was who and what was what. It’s only after you read a little
bit in each chapter that you think, “Oh, yeah, it’s that particular dead
person.” And, although the chapters were short and quick, there were just too
many of them at 90 chapters total.
A faster pace and fewer deaths would’ve made this more focused and more exciting. The various deaths seemed interesting at first, but the long investigations became too daunting. I wish we could’ve gotten down to the real clues much sooner. But the read was generally pretty good and I liked the details in the cases. Good for those that liked to get really involved in multiple cases.
A fairly nice mystery.
Rating: 3 stars
Frank Lazarus was born and raised in West Philadelphia and attended Overbrook High School, as you may have guessed from his writings.
After graduating high school, Frank spent two years in the U.S. Army during the VietNam War. After his service, he completed his
Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration at St. Joseph’s University, in Philadelphia.
He was in the Financial Services and Life Insurance industry for fifty-three years before he retired at the end of 2021.
Frank has three adult children and five grandchildren.
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The covers look really good. Sounds like a good mysterty.
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