Identity Crisis Book

Debbi Mack's debut novel, "Identity Crisis," has a lot going for it. It's a well-written, briskly paced, plot-packed detective mystery that makes strong but subtle use of its Chesapeake Bay-area settings held my attention for the most part. Overall, it's a few cuts above the majority of self-published fare.

Unfortunately, it's a little too packed with plot -- to the extent that the final act goes off the rails, with way too many scenes in which way too much is explained. I found myself jumping back and forth, trying to make sense of who did what to who and for what reasons, and not often succeeding.

And what's explained most of all is that most of the mystery in the preceding pages was a red herring that distracted from a solution that no reader of "Identity Crisis" could possibly have anticipated. That, in my opinion, cheated me as a reader out of the "Aha! Fiendishly clever! I should have figured that one out!" moment that makes good mystery fiction so satisfying.

What was ostensibly a tale of identity theft and murderous greed -- and a very complicated one at that, filled with shifting money, drifting evidence and possible double-crosses by the bucketful -- gets almost completely tossed aside in favor of a story of personal vengeance that comes out of nowhere. It all culminates in an overly talky climactic scene in which the killers, peripheral characters to that point, all but stop the action to explain. And explain and explain and explain.

The overall impression I get is that the author lost the handle on the plot and had to scramble to tie together several loose strands of plot.

I'd almost be OK with that if I cared more about the characters, but the book's heroine, Sam McRae, is not particularly well-developed. She's a lawyer who seems to have only one client -- someone who starts off being charged with murder and ends up almost completely offstage -- and seems to forget her canon of ethics as often as not. Some of the things she does, like being ahead of the police in questioning the owner of a strip club that appears to be run by a couple of scam artists or not reporting a mob beating that hospitalized her for a week, stretch plausibility to the breaking point.

The shadings of her character seem to be cobbled together from other detective novels -- a cat, a crappy car, a caretaker neighbor and a complacent lover among them -- and don't add up to anything compelling. (I did appreciate that the developing new love interest, a competing investigator, was nicely underplayed.)

All that being said, I admired Mack's grasp of genre craft, and was glad to see that she ensured her novel received strong story-editing and copy-editing. While I was disappointed in "Identity Crisis," I also see that Debbi Mack knows her stuff. So I'll give her, and Sam McRae, another chance in the next book in this series, the just-released "Least Wanted."