Funeral Hotdish

November 30, 2015
As she did in Cattle Kate (2014), veteran crime reporter Bommersbach draws on actual events for this ripped-from-the-headlines novel, which finds an odd but mostly effective way to show both ends of America’s illegal drug trade. In Phoenix, Ariz., in 1999, reporter Joya Bonner becomes aware that Mafia turncoat Sammy “the Bull” Gravano is bamboozling the FBI by using his refuge in the Federal Witness Protection Program to run a narcotics ring that’s distributing pills all the way to Joya’s peaceful hometown of Northville, N.Dak., where the death of 17-year-old Amber Schlener from a bad dose of Ecstasy sparks misguided vigilante violence. In Phoenix, Joya covers the police investigation that nails Sammy and his son. Back home in Northville, she keeps a lazy sheriff from arresting the wrong people—but it’s almost certain that the town’s smug innocence has been lost. Sharp writing and incisive characterization bring both stories to life.

December 1, 2015
An Arizona transplant chases the scoop of the century while folks back in her Minnesota hometown discover club drugs. When Joya Bonner spots Sammy "The Bull" Gravano in a Tempe coffee shop, she realizes that her piece on research fraud at Arizona State University is small potatoes compared to the story that's landed in her lap. The investigative reporter somehow thinks it would be OK to disclose the location of a federally protected witness if the revelation would help her trump a rival newshound. Her boyfriend, police detective Rob Stiller, persuades her to hold back, not because trumpeting Sammy's whereabouts in her weekly, Phoenix Rising, would put the Mafioso in the cross hairs of any members of the Gambino crime family his testimony hasn't already sent to jail, but because the police suspect Gravano's back in the business and are running a sting operation to catch him. While Joya sits in the Maricopa sheriff's office listening to wiretaps, her parents back in Northville, North Dakota, are reeling along with the rest of the town over the death of vibrant young high school senior Amber Schlener, who let her boyfriend, Johnny Roth, talk her into taking just one Ecstasy pill, which made her happy, happy, happy, and dead. Sick of Sheriff Sylvester Joseph Potter's failure to arrest whoever supplied Johnny with the drug, Joya's father, Ralph, and two of his pals take the law into their own hands and hatch a revenge plot that deals Northville a second deadly blow. Like the eponymous hotdish, Bommersbach's debut novel contains a little of everything but nothing that spells haute literary cuisine. The author of The Trunk Murderess: Winnie Ruth Judd: The Truth About an American Crime Legend Revealed at Last (1992) might be better off sticking with true crime.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2016
In her second mystery, investigative journalist Bommersbach makes creative use of stories she has covered in real life. Joya Bonner, a Phoenix reporter, is in a cafe, interviewing a student about possible research fraud on campus, when a man she recognizes as Sammy The Bull Gravano, Mafia hit man currently in the witness-protection program after ratting out John Gotti, and wonders what the Bull is doing in town. She asks her homicide-detective boyfriend, who turns out to be involved in an undercover operation investigating Sammy's business ventures, which may include selling recreational substances. The story becomes personal when Joya learns from her family in North Dakota that a teenager is dead and another in a coma after using Ecstasy that may have come from one of Sammy's dealers. This compelling story provides a fascinating look at both small-town life and big-city crime. A good choice for readers who enjoy Hank Phillippi Ryan's Jane Ryland series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)