The Someday File: Deuce Mora Series, Vol. 1

Chicago reporter Deuce Mora, the appealing narrator of Heller’s well-crafted and suspenseful series opener, is a columnist for the Chicago Journal, a paper facing declining readership and revenues, and is at odds with her editor, who wants her to tone down her treatment of controversial issues such as gun control. Meanwhile, a sniper assassinates eight-term Congressman Charles Reading in Las Vegas, Nev. Just the evening before, Deuce met with ex-con Vinnie Colangelo, a potential human-interest story whose name had been in her “someday file” of such leads. Vinnie was drunk when she spoke to him at his Cicero home, but Reading’s murder makes her consider his warnings that something big was going to happen in Las Vegas in a new light. Before she can follow up, however, Vinnie is murdered. Motivated by guilt that her meeting precipitated Vinnie’s death, Deuce turns sleuth. The story line is nicely twisty without stretching probability. [em](BookLife) [/em]