Everyone in Idyll, Conn., is surprised when a young woman named Cecilia North is found shot to death on the town's golf course. It's the late 1990s, and Idyll is not the sort of place that has violent crime, let alone murder. Unfortunately for new police chief Thomas Lynch, everyone in town is watching him as his team attempts to solve the crime. Making the case even trickier is the fact that Lynch saw Cecilia barely an hour before her death. But if he reveals to anyone where he saw her, he'd have to also confess his deepest secret: he's gay.
So Lynch tries to solve the case on his own, without letting his detectives realize what's going on. Idyll may seem idyllic on the surface, but his casual queries soon make Lynch realize that danger, homophobia and prejudice lurk just beneath the surface. He'll have to tread carefully in order to solve Cecilia's murder, without hurting himself politically or personally.
In Idyll Threats, Stephanie Gayle (My Summer of Southern Discomfort) has created an engaging mystery with a believable denouement. But what makes it stand out is its complicated protagonist: Lynch's desperate attempts to find out the truth about Cecilia's death without compromising his own secrets make for fascinating reading. And given the late '90s setting, cell phones are a rarity and Internet searches practically unknown, forcing the detectives to work the case the old-fashioned way, by interviewing the delightfully quirky Idyll inhabitants. --Jessica Howard, blogger at Quirky Bookworm