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The Color of Light: A Maggie MacGowen Mystery    by Wendy Hornsby Amazon.com order for
Color of Light
by Wendy Hornsby
Order:  USA  Can
Perseverance Press, 2014 (2014)
Softcover
* * *   Reviewed by Mary Ann Smyth

Filmmaker Maggie MacGowen, while cleaning out her late father's desk, discovers probable evidence in a brutal, unsolved murder that happened thirty years before. At the time, this murder terrorized the Berkley community where she grew up.

Wendy Hornsby has never disappointed me in her previous Maggie MacGowen books. I was again hooked on the first page. And the cover is a stunner.

Maggie, shocked by what she has found, starts asking questions of her father's old friends and of the university's various department heads. She ventures into the Vietnamese community as the murdered woman was Vietnamese. She is disappointed by her cool reception and unable to ask the questions she wants answered. She calls on childhood friends to help her, but they prove strangely reticent.

The Color of Light is a finely crafted work with not an unnecessary word. The plot drifts off to small tangents that Hornsby quickly ties into the main line. Her characters are believable with true emotions about the woman's death. A few want Maggie to leave her quest to find the murderer. Others aren't happy with Maggie but believe in what she is doing.

Unfortunately, those who want her to go away might mean permanently. The Color of Light is a tautly written mystery that is as good, if not better, than anything else Hornsby has written.

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