Barely Dead

Barely Dead
Allan McLeod
Lulu Press
ISBN: 1-4116-9871-0
Fiction, Mystery
Reviewed by Shannon Frost

When international freelance journalist, Paige Harrington, receives a phone call from her father informing her of the suicide of her beloved best friend, Wally Adams, her highly tuned instincts scream foul play. She flies back to her hometown, High River, near Calgary, Alberta Canada, and finds that she doesn’t need to travel the world to uncover corruption and deceit. As she steps into the last days of Wally’s life, she discovers his protests against the building of a multi-million dollar fertilizer plant left him with many enemies, and that his death meant the resurrection of the toxic deal. What she can’t figure out is why Wally drew a connection between the fertilizer plant, “Project 321”, and a murdered stripper named Peppermint. To uncover the truth, Paige decides it’s time to utilize her beauty and brains, and becomes a stripper at The Garter, the same club as the murdered woman. In doing so, she enters a world where everyone has a secret, and everything around her is more complex than she ever imagined.
The novel moves at a steady pace, painting each scene with concise detail. The chapters are snapshot short, which in the beginning of the story helps to keep plot moving, but as the story progresses, tends to interrupt the flow as many chapters containing the same scene could be blended into one for a smoother progression. The side mysteries that branch off the larger conflict of Project 321 help to keep tension in the plot since the grander mystery of whose behind it all is revealed fairly early to the reader. The women of The Garter are not only realistic, but very sympathetic in the lives they’ve led. Where Barely Dead truly shines is on the well developed character of Paige Harrington whose confidence and determination creates a strong female heroine. The narrative is mostly in first person from Paiges’s perspective, and author McLeod skillfully gives her a voice that is easy to connect with and comfortable. With the cover of Barely Dead reading that it is A Paige Harrington Mystery, it leaves hope that she will appear to lead in another mystery novel.