Midsummer Malice

Peggy O'Neill Mystery #9

by M.D. Lake

Campus cop Peggy O'Neill is making her nightly rounds when she runs into Steadman George, the aging piano man who lives and works aboard the university's Showboat Theater, docked on the Mississippi. Tonight he has a tale to tell.

Twenty years ago Steadman helped an unmarried teen sell her baby to a show-biz couple, and he's kept the shady deal to himself—until now. The biological mother is back, looking for her daughter, and Steadman wonders if he should help her, or help himself to a different deal.

But the day after Peggy hears Steadman's nostalgic story, she's finishing his body out of the river. Despite opinions to the contrary, Peggy's sure this was no accident, and it's time to investigate. Because a dirty little secret from the past is about to explode in tomorrow's tabloid scandal—stunning the innocent, rocking the righteous, and driving someone to desperation. . .and murder.

Genres: Mystery

265 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published December 1, 1997

About the author

MD Lake is the pseudonym for Allen Simpson, a professor of Scandanavian literature at the University of Minnesota and a former humor columnist for The Minnesota Daily. An Agatha-Award winning author, he has published ten Peggy O'Neill mysteries.

Reviews

[Carl Brookins · Rating 4 out of 5]

M. D. Lake wrote a series about a campus cop named Peggy O'Neill. The setting is a major university in the midst of a big city. A river runs through it. The setting is a thinly disguised University of Minnesota. It's a good place to set a mystery series, because, like any serious university community, there are interesting anomalies, odd characters, weird members of the faculty and unusual events around which to weave stories. M. D. makes good use of his settings.

One of the more unusual elements of the University of Minnesota community for many years, was the Showboat, an ancient pseudo-antebellum paddle wheeler with a steel hull and no engine, moored to the river bank of the legendary Mississippi River below the East Bank Campus of the University. Summers, the Theatre department used the showboat to provide a paying public with "mellerdrama" and other diverse entertainments. This year, an old ragtime and jazz alcoholic pianist named Steadman George, who plays accompaniment for the current show, has been hired to live aboard and protect the showboat from wandering dogs and vandals. Trouble is, "Steady" has a twenty-year old secret, about how he helped a frightened teen aged girl sell her newborn child to a local couple. Now, driven by a new need to learn the fate of that child, the mother's back in town.

Lake has given O'Neill a rock-steady independent frame of mind as well as a sometimes quirky outlook. Agree or not with her, O'Neill is the kind of person you'd like to spend time with. She's exactly the sort of character around which to build a successful series the character that many authors never develop. As always, he book is well-written, logical, and moves right along. Midsummer Malice and Peggy O'Neill are just right for a crisp autumn evening by the fire.