The overwritten prose with its excessive use of similes doesn’t help. What starts out as an intriguing police procedural gets sidetracked into romantic suspense (plenty of sex but not much suspense), mixed up with some marital and family drama, and topped with a bit of an unreliable narrator. It’s a shame she doesn’t explore this unusual law enforcement world in further detail. As a former police transcriber, the author writes what she knows. When Hazel meets the “criminally attractive” Nik, she soon gets drawn into the investigation and a steamy affair despite being married to the controlling, gun-loving Tommy.

She learns that Sam’s confession is tied to the overdose death of a 9-year-old boy at the hands of pill pusher Tyler Krejarek. The following night, Hazel is startled to receive a report from Investigator Nikolai Kole, who had been suspended from the force six months earlier. On one of her first evenings, she's horrified when her next-door neighbor Sam approaches her office and writes a message on the frosted window: 'I hid a body.' The finger he uses is not his own. Gritty Black Harbor, Wisconsin, is a small city with big-city crime, the kind of place “that not only keeps decent people just racing past on the highway but attracts criminals and seedy characters who need somewhere to hide.” Newly hired police transcriber and aspiring writer Hazel Greenlee works the night shift, transcribing incident reports. (Dec.Morrissey’s atmospheric suspense debut introduces a troubled female police transcriber who goes beyond her job description to solve a drug case. Agent: Sharon Pelletier, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.

Nonetheless, readers will be eager to see what further mysteries Black Harbor may harbor. Morrissey skillfully interweaves these twisty plot strands, even as some developments strain credulity. As their bond blooms into friendship, Ryan comes to realize that Morgan may unwittingly hold the key to not only his partner’s murder but also the town’s most high-profile cold case: the disappearance 20 years earlier of wealthy mogul Clive Reynolds. Maybe it has something to do with the scars both bear from their deeply dysfunctional families, or the secrets that could get one bounced from the force and put the other behind bars. But as guilt-ridden Ryan pursues his own unofficial investigation, gradually breaking through the defenses Morgan has built up as a survivor of childhood abuse, the pair prove surprisingly sympatico.

At first glance, straight-arrow police officer Ryan Hudson, whose former patrol partner has just been fatally shot during a convenience store stickup, and goth photographer Morgan Mori, a traumatized eyewitness, have little in common besides the bad luck to be living in crime-infested Black Harbor, Wis., the gritty setting for this intriguing if flawed thriller from Morrissey ( Hello, Transcriber).

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