New Book Alert: The Family Man: Getting Away With Murder by Anna Willett; Efficient and Engaging Psychological Thriller About Cold Unsolved Crimes Finally Becoming Warm and Solved

 New Book Alert: The Family Man: Getting Away With Murder by Anna Willett; Efficient and Engaging Psychological Thriller  About Cold Unsolved Crimes Finally Becoming Warm and Solved

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: No matter how long ago a crime occurred, there will always be a demand for it to be solved.  A deceased John or Jane Doe finally has a DNA match and is reburied under their real names. A murderer or pedophile who long ago escaped justice is finally held under scrutiny, has their day in court, and victims are finally vindicated. Sometimes it takes many years for a cold case to get warm.

Anna Willett's The Family Man: Getting Away With Murder shows just such a situation. It is an engaging and efficient psychological thriller about the resurrection of a long ago kidnapping and murder case that has been screaming to get a resolution and how that resolution is finally answered.

Married couple, Marcy and Dustin just moved into a new house. While cleaning out the attic, Dustin sees an old VHS tape. The curious couple watch and are horrified by what they see. No it's not a home video of an embarrassing Christmas or a Tommy Wiseau film. It's much worse.

What they see are four people, two men and two women, bound, hooded, and dressed in their underthings. Three of them recite the same lines and the fourth is defiant to her captors. It doesn't matter. The results are the same. The screen goes dark and it doesn't leave much to the imagination as to what happens to them.

Marcy and Dustin turn the VHS into the police. DS Veronika Pope leads the investigation. They immediately find out that the house once belonged to Thomas Malicourt, a deceased businessman with a wife, April, and daughter, Hannah. To all intents and purposes, he was the ideal family man. But this tape opens up another darker side to him, one that is depraved and violent. 

Unfortunately, Malicourt is dead and has been for sometime. But this case is far from over. The four victims are not identified. There is also a good chance that Malicourt had an accomplice that is not identified and is wandering around unchecked and not caught, looking for a new opportunity to feed off their lust. 

The Family Man intensely pits Veronika's courage and dedication to her job against Malicourt's violent tendencies and sociopathic ability to cover his crime even after two decades. 

Veronika is presented as an interesting lead character without her personal life taking over her role of solving this case. She is a single mother of a teenage son. Both she and her son live with her mother who helps look after the boy when Mom is on duty. Being both a police officer and a mother, Veronika feels very strongly about this case especially after the victims are identified and some of them were only a few years older than her son. This protectiveness allows her to focus on the case at hand until it is solved.

The more Veronika and her colleagues peer into Malicourt's private life, the more that they see what a sick sadistic person that he really was and spent much time hiding that depravity behind an unimpeachable good name. It turns out that the name was all that was good about him. 

Besides using DNA, the police have to rely on old articles and reports of missing people in the Perth area. (Interesting fact: this is the second suspense thriller  that I reviewed this year that is set in Perth, the first being Robert News' The Colours of Death: Sgt. Thomas's Casebook.)

They also interview friends,coworkers, and family members of Malicourt and the victims. The quiet unassuming man of their descriptions becomes a violent unrepentant monster the more that his private life is investigated.

Some witnesses and interview subjects are grateful to finally see justice done and receive answers to the disappearance of their loved ones. Some like Malicourt's daughter, Hannah, are openly hostile and don't want to reopen bad memories. Ultimately, it's Hannah and her family that become the catalysts that result in a break in the case. 

The Family Man is the type of book that reminds their Reader that sometimes it takes time, but justice will be met.