POSTMARKED CASTLE COVE--Review

 POSTMARKED CASTLE COVE

by Judy M. Kerr 

ISBN: 978-1-63304-075-5

Released by Launch Point Press, 2025 

MC McCall is an up-front on-duty experienced member of the US Postal  Service. She's also a recently recovering alcoholic. She's just finished a recovery program at a local clinic in Minnesota, faces regular AA meetings and two of her long-time Minneapolis pals. Not a happy camper. 

Her next assignment is a few hundred miles north to Castle Grove and a robbery at the local post office. McCall recognizes she's still in some ways on probation so she sets out to nail down this relatively minor crime. Readers of this troubling, intense crime novel will surely recognize that McCall is about to step onto a slippery slope and into an evil, dangerous and nasty situation that far outranks a simple robbery gone awry.

The author's language is precise and firm, often blunt, but always to the point. The characters come alive off the page and sometimes smack a reader in the face. The pace of the novel is relentless, even those character-explaining asides when McCall returns to home base in Saint Paul, interruptions in her pursuit of the postal robber.

Gradually, readers are introduced to that region of Minnesota called the North Shore which has a significant effect on the plot and on many of the characters that people this story. There are a lot of characters, but most are carefully detailed so as to be separately recognized by the reader.

Postal Inspector McCall is gradually drawn into crimes in Castle Cove which are the most evil and heinous imaginable. And while they are dealt with by this author in a way that makes the reading more palatable, that decision tends to slightly reduce the punch of the actions of some of the characters. Be that as it is, the novel follows McCall's struggle with her personal additions and the negative influence of the evil she confronts in thoughtful, careful ways that will engage the sympathetic and attentive reader.