#BlogTour-‘Man At The Door’ by Desmond P Ryan

About the book…

It all begins at 6:10 a.m. on a Friday morning when Glen Brebeuf calls demanding answers. He had reported his former lover, Elizabeth MacDonald, missing the previous day and Detective Mike O’Shea now finds himself cleaning up the mess that some rookie had made of the initial call.

Within hours, Mike takes over the investigation and is on the doorstep of the missing elderly woman’s home. Sibby Mac, as she is known to her friends, is not missing.

Sibby Mac has been murdered.

In Man At The Door, the third in Desmond P. Ryan’s Mike O’Shea Crime Fiction Series, Detective Mike O’Shea solves a homicide, juggles an increasingly complex personal life, and continues to hunt for the cop-killer who has remained at large for the past thirteen years.

Whether as a stand-alone or as your next step in this six-book series, Man At The Door will keep you reading far too late into the night following Detective Mike O’Shea through the twists and turns of a homicide investigation.

Huge thanks to Shell Baker of Baker’s Promos for the blog tour invite-as a fan of the Mike O’Shea mysteries I was thrilled to be on board for book 3, ‘Man At The Door’!

Several threads from previous books make their way into the story where Mike has been seconded to light desk duty and investigating missing people ,after the events of Book 2 have left him physically weakened, This also gives him the opportunity to continue investigating a horrific death which still haunts him from Book 1 and also haunts the reader-I would recommend reading them in order, however, ‘Man At The Door’ can be read as a standalone novel.

Plunging straight into Mike’s latest court case, it is like meeting old friends again-you haven’t seen them for a while but you quickly catchup. Riding a desk now whilst dealing with the mental and physical fallout from earlier cases, what lands on Mike’s lap in this one is highly unusual…

Elizabeth MacDonald-or Sibby Mac-is missing, A 71 year old woman who should have been immediately flagged as vulnerable because of her age, has no been so-as a result, valuable time has been wasted. However, the reader can see wy it wasn’t given proper attention by the person handling the inital call from Glen Brebeuf, her friend.

And this is where the ‘man at the door’ comes into play, he is the very reason this investigation has begun-Glen has always been asked to water Sibby’s plants when she goes away so to turn up to her house and find a complete stranger there, is highly unlike Glen’s friend’s normal behaviour.

Alarm bells immediately start ringing as the reader wonders just who is this man? Is he even real? Is the man at the door an invention of Glen’s and is he the actual threat to Sibby?

Using clever misdirection and challenging conceptions, Ryan takes you on a whipsmart police procedural case which has you hurtling  through the pages to find out ‘whodunnit’-if , indeed, there is a whodunnit-as Mike’s antennae prick up at Glen’s insitence that Sibby’s behaviour is so outside the norm that a simple act, not answering the door, leaves him to believe that she is dead.

The notion of an older woman lover-Sibby being 52 and Glen 21 when they initially began their relationship-is one that is not normally dealt with in books, and is sensitively discussed as one by one, Sibby’s neighbours express their concerns. The initial call, which was dismissed by another police officer, is exactly what gets Mike’s instinct on red alert and shows why he is such a intuitive detective, picking up on what others would -and did- ignore.

It also reflects on the nature of community and how we treat the ‘elderly’-because Sibby is 72 there is an element of being ‘written off’-and as Mike turns up the heat in trying to find the missing woman, the juxtaposition between his family life, and Sibby’s, is brought into stark relief.

Who was the man at the door? Is it a piece of misdirection to throw Mike off the scent by Glen?

Does their past as lovers or as government employees have anything to do with it?

Interweaving this case with Mike’s homelife and a cast of characters that have become familiar, and welcoming presences on the crime lover’s bookshelf, ‘Man At The Door’ establishes not only Desmond Ryan’s place in the crime writing panthoen, it brings the lucky reader the next in his series of police investigations.

Highly recommended to lovers of police procedurals, mysteries and crime thrillers, I love the family dynamic which grounds Mike in each case . Roll on 2020 and Book 4!!

About the author…

For almost thirty years, Desmond P. Ryan began every day of his working life with either a victim waiting in a hospital emergency room, or a call to a street corner or a blood-soaked room where someone had been left for dead. Murder, assaults on a level that defied humanity, sexual violations intended to demean, shame, and haunt the individuals who were no more than objects to the offenders: all in a day’s work.

It was exhilarating, exhausting, and often heartbreaking.

As a Detective with the Toronto Police Service, Desmond P. Ryan wrote thousands of reports detailing the people, places, and events that led up to the moment he came along. He investigated the crimes and wrote synopses for guilty pleas detailing the circumstances that brought the accused individuals before the Courts. He also wrote a number of files to have individuals deemed either Not Criminally Responsible due to mental incapacity, or Dangerous Offenders to be held in custody indefinitely.

Now, as a retired investigator with three decades of research opportunities under his belt, Desmond P. Ryan writes crime fiction.

Real Detective. Real Crime. Fiction.

Links-https://realdesmondryan.com/

Links to book reviews from earlier in the series-

http://79.170.40.167/rachelreadit.co.uk/blog-tour-10-33-assist-police-by-desmond-ryan/

http://79.170.40.167/rachelreadit.co.uk/novella-review-the-funeral-by-desmond-p-ryan/

http://79.170.40.167/rachelreadit.co.uk/blogtour-death-before-coffee-by-desmond-p-ryan/

Twitter @RealDesmondRyan

@BakerPromo