Book ~ "Real Murder" (2014) Lauren Carr

From Goodreads ~ When Homicide Detective Cameron Gates befriends Dolly, the little old lady who lives across the street, she is warned not to get lured into helping the elderly woman by investigating the unsolved murder of one of her girls. “She’s senile,” Cameron is warned. “It’s not a real murder.”

Such is not the case. After Dolly is brutally murdered, Cameron discovers that the sweet blue-haired lady’s “girl” was a call girl, who had been killed in a mysterious double homicide.

Meanwhile, Prosecuting Attorney Joshua Thornton is looking for answers to the murder of a childhood friend, a sheriff deputy whose cruiser is found at the bottom of a lake. The deputy had disappeared almost twenty years ago while privately investigating the murder of a local prostitute.

It doesn’t take long for the Lovers in Crime to put their cases together to reveal a long-kept secret that some believe is worth killing to keep undercover. 

There are three timelines in the book ...

In 1976, Ava, a call girl, and her guest are found murdered in Dolly's, the gentleman's club where she works, and the case is never solved.

In 1996, Mike, a sheriff's deputy, disappears on his way to meeting an informant on a case he was working on and is never found.

It's now 2014.  Joshua is a prosecuting attorney and Cameron is a homicide detective and they've recently gotten married, though is adult children, especially his daughter, Tracey, aren't too crazy about the idea.

Mike's body has just been found at the bottom of a lake, still in his cruiser and the investigation begins to find out what happened. In the meantime, Cameron befriends Joshua's elderly neighbour, Dolly.  Dolly tells Cameron about the murder of Ava, one of her "girls", many years ago and how the murder was never solved.  Then Dolly is found brutally murdered.

As more deaths are rediscovered and reinvestigated from the past, it seems like they may be connected ... but are they?  I was okay with how everything came to together and the murders were solved in the end.

This is the third book I've read by this author and I enjoyed it ... it is the second I've read in the Joshua and Cameron series.  I liked the writing style and it kept my interest ... I kept wanting to read more to find out what was going to happen.  It's written in third person perspective.

There were a lot of characters.  In case you have a hard time keeping track of them, there was a cast of characters list in the front of the book to refer back to if needed.  I liked Joshua and Cameron and thought they were good together.  Donny, Joshua's youngest son, is fifteen and lives with them and accepted and liked Cameron in his life.  Dolly, though not in the book long, sounded like a feisty colourful old girl who had lots of stories to tell (Al Capone was her "Uncle Al").

I look forward to reading more in this series.