It’s tough to make the lead character in a mystery series stand out these days. They all seem to have the same
flaws, the same friends and the same problems, giving even the most original of plots a sense of unwanted déjà
vu.
Thank goodness then for Karen E. Olson and the protagonist she’s created with her Annie Seymour character.
Dead of the Day is Olson’s third mystery featuring Seymour, the intrepid and irreverent journalist
living in New Haven, Connecticut. As in her previous adventures, Seymour finds herself mixed up in things pretty
quickly. There’s a body floating in the harbor and the fact that the unidentified corpse is strangely covered
in bee stings is more than enough to pique Annie’s journalistic instincts. It also provides her with a
distraction from what she views as a boring piece on the town’s new chief of police and her own collapsed
relationship with P.I. Vinny DeLucia. Things change in a hurry, though, when the police chief is killed and the
two deaths, initially thought to be unrelated, begin to come together in an ugly way.
The plotting is tight, the characters are fully drawn and the turns taken are unexpected. Olson uses her
background as a former journalist to add realism to both the newsroom and Annie’s working ways, while deftly
weaving in finely detailed nuance to the New England setting. It is really Annie who makes this story - and the
previous two - go. She’s independent, strong, funny, fallible and tends to open her big mouth even when she
knows she shouldn’t. But that’s exactly what makes her work so well. The realistic way she attempts to balance
her unsettled personal life with the hectic nature of her professional life gives her character a certain amount
of depth that doesn’t make its way into the lives of most fictional heroines. Olson has done a superb job in
crafting a character with the strength and complexity to carry a mystery series on her shoulders.
Dead of the Day is a winner in every way.