Review of ‘Terminal Secret’

Posted on November 30, 2017 Updated on November 24, 2017

A government attorney is murdered on her doorstep in a wealthy DC neighborhood. A senator’s wife approaches a private detective to find out who killed her ex-husband, a disabled army veteran. Two seemingly unrelated cases, the first assigned to DC detective Earl Wallace and his new partner, both by-the-books cops; and the second to lawyer/private eye Dan Lord, a man who makes his own rules in his pursuit of justice. They soon learn that their cases are related and portend even more dead bodies, perhaps their own, if they don’t find the mastermind behind a series of crimes being committed by people who are terminally ill with cancer. The key, Dan discovers, is an old case involving a now-dead drug dealer, but the time to solve it is quickly running out.

Terminal Secret by Mark Gilleo is a high-octane mystery-thriller that uncovers the raw underbelly of our nation’s capital in ways that other novels set in Washington, DC often fail to do. It swings effortlessly from wealthy Georgetown enclaves to the wasteland of Anacostia’s neighborhoods, introducing the reader to the variety of colorful, and sometimes dangerous, denizens of DC’s asphalt jungle.

I give Gilleo four and a half stars for this one.