Deadly Ruse

E. Michael Helms

(Seventh Street – paperback, Kindle)

Fans of E. Michael Helms’s debut “Mac McClellan Mystery” novel, Deadly Catch, will be pleased with this fine new addition to the series.

In Deadly Ruse, Mac’s girlfriend, Kate Bell, thinks she has seen a ghost–specifically, a previous boyfriend who supposedly was killed at sea more than a decade ago, along with two other passengers when their boat caught fire and sank. Mac reluctantly begins to investigate and soon finds himself caught up in a very dangerous case involving drugs, diamonds, murder–and more.

Mac McClellan is an appealing everyman character. In Deadly Ruse, he is still trying to figure out what he wants to do next with his life, now that he has fought in Iraq and been retired from the U.S. Marines for a while. Sometimes, however, Helms lets the everyman angles go just a bit overboard, with Kate saying “Dang, Mac” too often and Mac making an occasional commonplace pronouncement such as “You take the proverbial cake” or “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”

Deadly Ruse is set in the Florida Panhandle and briefly in Texas and Atlanta, Georgia, and Helms has a fine knack for blending real locales into his fiction. In this new novel, Mac manages to get his basic Florida private investigator’s license, while cracking a big case. But, under Florida law, he will have to continue interning for a detective agency for two years before he can go out on his own. Thus, the Mac McClellan Mystery series is now set up well for future cases.

E. Michael Helms is a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War and author of a combat memoir, The Proud Bastards, as well as a two-part Civil War novel, Of Blood and Brothers.

 — Si Dunn