Reviewed by Dan
TITLE: Murder in the Irish Channel
SERIES: Chanse MacLeod Mysteries #6
AUTHOR: Greg Herren
PUBLISHER: Bold Stroke Books
LENGTH: 288 Pages
BLURB:
It begins as a simple missing persons case—a young MMA fighter’s mother has mysteriously disappeared. But as New Orleans private eye Chanse MacLeod starts digging around, he discovers that she is the leader of a group fighting the powerful Archdiocese of New Orleans over the closing of two churches. As the trail leads from corrupt church officials to powerful real estate developers to the world of cage fighting, Chanse soon realizes there are a lot of powerful people who want to make sure she stays gone—and don’t have a problem with getting rid of a pesky gay private eye.
REVIEW:
Welcome to another Chanse MacLeod mystery from Greg Herren. This time Chanse is on the trail of a missing person, but there is a lot more to the story than he is hearing about.
Near the end of book five in the series, Chanse meets a young man with impeccable breeding, and they begin dating. I would love to say that Rory and Chanse are in a hot relationship and this book was all about them, but I’d be lying. Rory has a couple bit parts in the story, but as a far distant background character.
Rory is an HIV Tester and Counselor for NO / AIDS. One morning he tells Chanse about a young man that he met while testing the night before that needs help with a missing person case. To please his new lover, Chanse agrees to go and meet Jonny O’Neill, an up and coming MMA fighter to see if he can help him.
Up and coming is kind of a stretch. Jonny and his very pregnant wife are living in a very run down house in the Irish Channel area of New Orleans. Jonny is an MMA fighter, and one with prospects according to some promoters, but the up and coming hasn’t quite happened yet. This story though isn’t about Jonny and the MMA either. It is about the disappearance of Jonny’s mother, and that is why Chanse has come to the young man’s home.
As typical with a Greg Herren book, we’re left guessing what the actual story is and whodunit all the way up to the end of the story. Greg did a good job interweaving several different possibilities together, and introducing a lot of characters, so that the reader was left wondering exactly what was going on, right up until the final chapter, with some answers coming in the Afterward at the end of the book. Was it the church? Was it the Carpet Bagger? Was there something up with the former team mate of Chanse? Or was it all something to do with the damn insurance company that wouldn’t pay their claims? You’ll have to read to the end and find out!
I like Greg’s writing. I really would have liked some gay relationship story in the middle here somewhere, but the book read like a mainstream mystery, where the detective just happens to be gay. I was disappointed at the ever decreasing role of his best friend Paige, who has always been one of my favorites in this series, and the very small roles of both Venus and Blaine in this one as well.
Overall though, I liked the story, and the writing was above average, so I’m going with a 3.5 out of 5.0 stars.
RATING: 
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