Shanghai Road by Claire O’Sullivan

Shanghai Road by Claire O’Sullivan
Series: Book 3 in the Whiskey River Mysteries series
Publisher: Elk Lake Publishing (November 23, 2024)

REVIEW BY PRISCILLA BETTIS

Shanghai Road is a Christian mystery and police procedural novel. It’s the third book in a series set in Whiskey River, Oregon, but it works perfectly well as a standalone.

Allie is a private detective who works closely with Whiskey River law enforcement, especially an officer named Ben. Cue the romantic interests, but I wouldn’t necessarily call this a romantic suspense novel because it’s too hard to think about love when a bad guy is pointing a sword (or a slithery python) at your chest. Yep, there are some unusual weapons in this story!

What starts as a simple fraud case morphs into a kidnapping case, a multi-state human trafficking scenario, and a murder case. The escalation kept me turning pages, and O’Sullivan did it all without uncomfortably graphic details.

Between the chase scenes and the forensics and the snakes, O’Sullivan inserts plenty of humor, especially physical humor: a Groucho Marx disguise, accidentally getting trapped hanging upside down (reminded me of Wile E. Coyote getting caught in one of his own snares), an unplanned bare bottom, and more. Characters’ speech and inner thoughts are humorous too, as in this passage when an insurance company hired Allie to spy on a rich guy:

I’d spent the last ten years eking out a less-than-legit living—mmm, no, more like microscopically marginally legit. So, my working a proper investigative job for an insurance company? For the moolah Granley Insurance was offering me, I’d do the job naked with a porcupine under each arm if they wanted me to.

-Claire O’Sullivan, Shanghai Road

There are also serious aspects to the characters. The novel drives home the point that people say and do odd or rude things because of stuff that happened in their past. Among the characters are survivors of poor foster care, for example, and their knee-jerk responses when witnessing an adult-child interaction are different from the reaction of someone raised in a loving home. But readers see characters give one another grace and find healing in God’s love.

I took off a fish because in dialogue scenes I sometimes got the characters mixed up (not enough dialogue tags), and sometimes characters were referred to by their first name, and sometimes by their last name, making me scratch my head to keep everyone straight.

But overall, I greatly enjoyed the mystery and how it grew in complexity over the course of the book, and I laughed at the humorous parts, and my heart was warmed by the characters’ healing and growth. Shanghai Road gets a solid four-fish rating from me.

I read Shanghai Road through Kindle Unlimited.