Annalise Ryan’s A Death in Door County turned out to be the perfect book for my flight to a library conference in Pennsylvania. While I was squished into a two-foot square space (thankfully I got the window seat), Ryan whisked me away with an interesting puzzle, an original protagonist, and, above all, the cool, wide Green Bay of Wisconsin. We didn’t fly over Wisconsin during my trip but it wasn’t hard to imagine as I looked down on fields and woods. Ryan uses real history (there are a lot of shipwrecks and a lot of legends about watery graves) as inspiration to build a clever mystery and establish a spooky atmosphere.
Morgan Carter specializes in the weird. She runs a bookshop and curiosity store (founded by her belated parents) in Door County. The store is “guarded” by an embalmed man (long story, explained in the book), stocked with crystal balls and Tarot cards, and jammed with odds and ends from around the United States. She’s also a cryptozoologist—which mostly means she’s occasionally asked to debunk Sasquatch sitings and tell folks, no, that’s not a chupacabra. But when a local police chief shows up at the shop to ask Morgan to look into a local murder, well, that actually is out of the ordinary.
Morgan—with the assistance and occasional rescue from Chief Joe Flanders—uses her analytical mind and healthy skepticism to find out what happened to two men who appear to have been drowned and crushed to death by a massive jaw near Death’s Door, a notorious passage in Green Bay. Morgan isn’t a perfect investigator; she’s far too willing to use the leeway granted to her by not being a law enforcement officer to pick locks and barge into places she probably shouldn’t be. She doesn’t have to wait for a warrant, which turns out to be very useful for securing important evidence before it can disappear. Ryan doesn’t make things too easy for her heroine. More than once Morgan has credible brushes with death to raise the stakes.
Readers looking for a fun mystery to help them escape whatever less-than-commodious surroundings they find themselves in will enjoy this one. Reading A Death in Door County felt like summer camp without the bugs but with (maybe) bonus lake monsters.
