Weekly Reader: Murder of a Runaway (A Belfast Murder Mystery Book Five) by Brian O'Hare; Sheehan and Co. Are Back To Top Form In This Mystery Involving Human Trafficking
By Julie Sara Porter
Bookworm Reviews
Spoilers: Brian O'Hare's Murder by The Coven took a brief unnecessary trip into the supernatural with a case that involved a Satanic cult and demonic possession. This time with his fifth book, he brings the Belfast Murder Mysteries back to form with the police procedural novel, Murder of a Runaway
While Murder on the Dark Web still remains the gold standard of the entire series with its subversion of good and evil by making the murderer more understandable and even sympathetic than their so-called victims, the Murder of a Runaway is still a great volume in the series. Good and evil are more defined and there are less shades of gray between guilt and innocence. However, it is still a suspenseful piece of work that develops the characters into those who truly need justice and those who provide it.
The body of a young Chinese girl is found. She is identified as Cheung Mingzhu, a scholarship student from Shenzhen University to study at Queen's. Unfortunately, she was seduced and forced to join a human trafficking ring. Alina Balauri, A Romanian woman is similarly forced into prostitution, and plans her escape in alternating chapters with the murder investigation. Meanwhile, there's a mysterious character called The Shadow who oversees all of this and is someone that you don't want to cross.
One of the more interesting aspects to this book is how it details the human trafficking process. Alina's chapters and Mingzhu's backstory explain exactly how people are brought into this system of buying and selling human beings. Sometimes it's not just a simple process of avoiding strangers or turning down what appears to be a shady job request.
The recruiters are often very charming and know how to play on their target's weaknesses such as low self esteem or familial poverty. They promise the person a job or a trip with them and the next thing that person knows they are in another country, forced into hard physical labor or sex work, deprived of their passport, abused and isolated from all contacts except their handlers. According to statistics the average age of a trafficking victim is 27 years old and often fall between 19 and 33. Some are as young as 11 to 14 years. Not to mention the children born to trafficked victims creating another generation that is being exploited. It's a terrible world.
Despite Murder of a Runaway being a fictional novel, it is very realistic on how this problem is portrayed and how it affects those who are caught up in that world.
Thankfully as terrible as the trafficking world is written, there are people like Sheehan and his team that fight it. As I mentioned before, these are the type of police officers that you wish would exist in real life, but don't always. They are good people who are truly protective of the innocent and immerse themselves fully in a case until it is solved and the guilty are punished.
The stand out is Andrew Jones, a coroner who between this and Murder by the Coven seems to be gaining a reputation as the Team Romantic. In both books, he becomes involved with a woman who plays an integral part of the investigation. In this book, he gets some cute moments where he dates Mingzhu's friend, Lin.
Often the side plot romance in a mystery ends badly or is a distraction from the main plot. But here there is enough charm between the couple, that this Reader couldn't help but hope that their relationship continues into future volumes.
Murder of a Runaway is not as good as Murder on the Dark Web but is miles better than Murder by the Coven. That is a marked improvement.
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