Welcome To The Horror Show: A Detective Mystery Thriller

"Welcome to the Horror Show" jumps from the beginning, when Youngstown Police Department detectives find the dead body of a young girl. The only clue at the scene besides a cryptic note that looks as if it has been written by a complete lunatic is a book of matches. Set in Youngstown, Ohio, a distressed, medium-sized city in the post-industrialized "Rust Belt", the central protagonist is a Youngstown Police Department detective named Dennis McHenry, a tough veteran of law enforcement. McHenry is a Vietnam veteran, a father, and a guy recovering from alcoholism and a failed marriage. Between the action of McHenry trying to piece together aspects of an ongoing set of brutal crimes throughout the work, he tries to put back together his life, too. As best as he can, anyhow. These little episodes delving into McHenry's personal life show that even the toughest cops are just people, too. And they have the same sorts of issues to deal with, personally, as any and all of us do.

As the novel progresses, the killer taunts McHenry with telephone calls. This psychotic sociopath informs McHenry exactly where to find a trail of dead bodies with these menacing, hostile, angry calls. Another victim is found in a rundown vacant house, and yet another is discovered in a large construction worker’s toolbox parked in a city park. The murdered corpse of a young woman is discovered by two secretaries walking to a law office in the downtown area early one morning.

Throughout the novel, McHenry is hit with a barrage of telephone calls from the father of the young girl murdered (discovered propped up in the bleachers of a high school practice football field). Finally, McHenry gets a call from the killer and some background noise during the telephone transmission gives him a clue as to where the call was placed from – so after making several phone calls, the detective pinpoints the exact location of the transmission. After visiting the bar, the suspect he’s looking for is nowhere to be found but an employee there tells McHenry the suspect has a strange tattoo of an evil clown face emblazoned on his forearm. After some smart police work, the detective finds his man. Once in custody, however, this suspect with the weird body art admits that he did not act alone. No, he had an accomplice for the murder of the first victim, but at the time, he was so inebriated that he tells police that he has little remembrance of this ghastly act of butchery. The second suspect still on the loose takes shots – on the roof of city hall - at McHenry, but misses, and it’s quite apparent that the shooter tried to miss. Meanwhile, during the action-packed ending part of the book, two elected officials in Youngstown are also gunned down - a judge and a city councilman. The second suspect's M.O. is very different than the first suspect's reason for killing. In the end, the sniper rifle is discovered in the strangest of all places and the identity of the actual murderer takes the police by surprise. These are just a few of the twists and turns of the plot, and suffice it to say, "Welcome to the Horror Show" is a gripping, fast-paced mystery novel – a hard-boiled work of detective crime fiction with all the spices and seasonings one expects to find mixed inside the rich broth of a good, hardcore, police who-done-it bowl of alphabet soup.

Yes, "Welcome to the Horror Show" is definitely a good addition to this genre and should entertain fans of the hard-boiled crime thriller.