Mad, Bad and Dead by Sherryl Clark

Publisher's Synopsis

A dead employee. A missing child. Anonymous phone calls in the dead of night. Judi Westerholme's troubles aren't over yet...

Already struggling to juggle co-running the local pub along with her new childcare responsibilities for her orphaned niece, Judi does not need her life to become any more complicated.

Yet, as usual, complications arrive in spades: she starts receiving threatening, late-night phone calls before discovering one of her employees, Kate, shot dead.

Judi finds herself caught up in a murder investigation, as well as the hunt for the Kate's fourteen year-old daughter, who has been missing since the murder.

Add in the uncertainty of her relationship with Melbourne-based D.S. Heath and the fact that her estranged mother's nursing home keeps urging her to visit, and Judi might finally be at breaking point.

My Review of Mad, Bad and Dead by Sherryl Clark

This is the 3rd book in a series featuring small-town pub owner Judi Westerholme. Owning and running a small-town pub is a stressful proposition at the best of times with the constant battle proving to be trying to keep your head above water. But for Judi, receiving threatening phone calls in the early hours, caring full-time for her 3 year old niece and then finding one of her employees, Kate, shot to death at home takes things to a new level.

To make matters worse, the dead woman’s daughter, Emma, is missing and it’s presumed she has fled for her life when her mother was killed. The hunt begins for Emma, but there are also questions about Kate’s past, her identity and why someone would come to this small town to have her killed.

Things escalate pretty quickly and a lot of it is directly the doing of Judi and her insistence that she owes it to Kate and her daughter. The police are well involved, some of whom have had dealings with Judi in previous incidents, there’s a killer still out there somewhere looking for Emma, Judi is receiving late night abusive phone calls and the local health farm is less than impressed that their residents are sneaking off to eat at the pub.

This is a fast moving, some might even say frantic, crime story that rushes from one dangerous confrontation to the next at a fast pace. I found it consistently entertaining and enjoyed the straightforward and abrasive attitude that Judi exhibits. It’s her ingenuity and determination that gets her into trouble, but it also ensures there’s something exciting going down.

Mad, Bad and Dead was a little more violent than I expected, but this speaks more to the fact that it was more hard-boiled mystery than soft-boiled. (You know what they say about judging a book by its cover).

As well as trying to work out who murdered Kate, her valued employee, Judi is also charged with the task of protecting Emma who is extremely distrustful of the police and wants nothing to do with them. This type of attitude causes exactly the types of confrontations you might expect and certainly ensures that things remain hot and spicy between Judi and a few of the detectives with whom she’s had run-ins with in the past.

I found this to be a fully engrossing story with a great deal going on to ensure my attention was undivided. The more mundane personal problems faced by Judi were nicely combined with far more outrageous problems giving us a taste of both a relatable lifestyle and one that’s completely out of control. Relatable as well as oh so not relatable. The result? A completely sympathetic character being placed into the most unbearable situations and then expected to survive.

When I started reading I wasn’t aware that I’d jumped into the middle of an ongoing series but soon became alerted by the fact that characters were coming into the story without any introduction and an assumption that the reader knew who they were and their relationship to Judi. Although I quickly caught up and worked out what was what, there was a definite chasm of information that wasn’t imparted about what had gone before. 

Bottom line, probably make sure you’ve read the earlier books in the series before embarking on this one because, quite frankly, knowing what I know after reading Mad, Bad and Dead I’m not really inclined to go back and read the earlier two books.