The Mephisto Diary
by Larry Rochelle
Mystery Available from Zumaya Publications ISBN: 1-894869-75-3 2003
Palmer Morel and his wife Missy have relocated to Charleston, South Carolina from Cincinnati. They are accepted at the Ashley Tennis Club where Palmer, a tennis pro, teaches the sport to Charleston's oldest and most privileged citizens. Everything begins to unravel when one of Palmer's students, a very promising tennis player, Mimi Collins, turns up dead and all signs lead to Palmer as the murderer. Suddenly Palmer is the outsider with a shady past and Charleston's bluebloods band together to cover up the real crime. Palmer becomes a fugitive with his wife Missy knee-deep in the middle of the town's shameful secret. The bluebloods known as the powerful SOB's control everything and their children have inherited the tainted blood. This leads to the Mephisto, an old establishment where young women are kept as sex slaves and disposed of at will, while new recruits are lured to town and enslaved at regular intervals. It's up to Palmer to extricate himself from the mess and come out alive while implicating the SOB's and putting an end to the multi-generation sex club. But one thing Palmer doesn't count on is in the Old South's blood runs deep and the powerful SOB's have their hand in just about everyone's pocket. Palmer finds friends are not to be trusted and the ones closest to him are the ones who will betray him. The Mephisto Diary is reminiscent of an old time hard-boiled detective novel with an updated twist of sex slavery along with murder as the crime in question. I enjoyed the unraveling of the case, though I like my mysteries to end either happily with the guy getting the girl or at least the bad guys getting their comeuppance. The story was depressing in context and the violence sudden and jolting. The motives for some of the characters were vague and details meandered a bit in the unfolding of the plot. There was some variance in the style of writing that didn't ring true and the name SOB's for the elite club members didn't quite jive with the flow of the story. The interspersing of parts of the diary was intriguing and made me curious to where it was leading and who was the keeper of the journal. It balanced out the rough edge to the story. If a reader is looking for a hard tale of suspense with a no holds barred approach to solving the crime, The Mephisto Diary will fill the bill.
Reviewer: Torie West, THE ROMANCE STUDIO July 31, 2004
Dallas attorney Stan Turner hates criminal law but has a propensity for attracting murder cases anyway. So, it's no big surprise when a simple attorney-ad-litem appointment in family court evolves into a complex murder trial.
Share
Save
