Hazel Greenlee likes to throw stuff off Forge Bridge; the objects range from a cheap bracelet to what readers of Hello, Transcriber will come to learn are items of greater significance. Hannah Morrissey's debut is a well-crafted thriller that splits its time between Hazel's professional and personal lives until they converge, a physical point of confluence being what she thinks of as the suicide bridge.
Narrator Hazel, who aspires to be a writer, and her husband, Tommy, an aquatic ecologist, hunter and gun nut, live in Black Harbor, a crime-blighted city outside Milwaukee in which suicide is almost as prevalent as the oxycodone use that so often accompanies it. After Hazel lands a job as the Black Harbor Police Department's new transcriber, one of the first reports that she types up concerns the death of a nine-year-old boy whose mouth exhibits the white foam associated with a drug overdose. The murder was brought to the police's attention by William "Sam" Samson, who confessed that, with the help of drug dealer Tyler Krejarek, he hid the body in a dumpster behind the apartment building in which the kid and Tyler both resided.
Hazel keeps mum about the fact that the other half of the duplex that she and Tommy live in is occupied by Sam: she fears that this amounts to a conflict of interest, and the last thing she wants is to be taken off the case. She's haunted by the boy's death and distracted by her blooming crush on investigator Nikolai Kole, who's handling the case, having just returned from a six-month suspension for a reason that no one is disclosing. Naturally, Hazel jumps at the chance to join Nik in snooping around the temporarily incarcerated Tyler's apartment--they don't have a search warrant--in pursuit of solid evidence against the creep.
Hello, Transcriber is wonderfully attuned to the particulars of Hazel's job, with its foam earbuds and transcription pedal and the reliable sound of static that precedes an officer's narrative. Although it's not clear why Hazel would put up with the beyond caddish Tommy ("At least he's nicer when he's drunk," she thinks at one point), Morrissey is a psychologically attentive writer who captures the bristly tension between longtime locals and newcomers. Without showing any sign of affection, a couple of colleagues call Hazel "Fargo"--a reference to her origins up north. Of course, when Nik calls Hazel "Podunk," things get swoony. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Hannah Morrissey's debut is an earthy thriller-romance hybrid centered on a married police department transcriber who becomes fixated on a case and on the detective covering it.