Category Archives: Harvey, Wyatt

Wyatt Harvey. Blood Rains: A Mick Priest Novel. New York: Eloquent Books, 2009.

Mikhael (Mick) Priest has a fabulous spread in Durham County–a large chateau on ten acres, with room for horses.  Good work for a private detective turned novelist.  Mick is proud of what he has achieved through hard work, patience, and religious faith.  It could be an idyllic life, but Mick, like Hamlet, has bad dreams.  As the novel opens, Mick has a dream of a former friend who has been brutally murdered.  Shortly after waking, another of Mick’s old friends, a police detective in Wilmington, calls.  Yes, Amanda Kenan, the woman in the dream, has been murdered.  The detective asks Mick to come to Wilmington to help with the investigation.

Wilmington is full of traps for Mick–old girlfriends, former colleagues, old enemies, a reporter looking for a big story.  And there might be a very big story.  Amanda is just the latest well-to-do local woman to have been murdered on a rainy night.  It appears that a serial killer is picking off women from some of Wilmington’s oldest, best families, women who are connected through a group called the Violettes.  But there is also evidence that the killer may have been inspired by London’s infamous Jack the Ripper.  Are these murders tied to the past, or is the motive for the crimes something quite ordinary? As Amanda continues to appear to Mick in dreams, Mick struggles to maintain his equilibrium and find the killer.

Check this title’s availability in the UNC-Chapel Hill Library catalog.

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Filed under 2000-2009, 2009, Coast, Harvey, Wyatt, Mystery, New Hanover, Suspense/Thriller