Unfinished Business: A Munch Mancini Crime Novel (Munch Mancini Novels)

Miranda "Munch" Mancini is quite a woman. She's a recovering drug and alcohol abuser; she's a southern California auto mechanic; she's the sole proprietor of a fledgling limo service; she's a loving mother to her 7-year-old adopted daughter, Asia. Set in the early 1980s, Barbara Seranella's fourth Mancini novel, Unfinished Business, has Munch and her friend, detective Mace St. John, in hot pursuit of a serial rapist-murderer who's killed one of her clients, the socialite Diane Bergman, and raped another, the actress Robin Davies. Worse--for all concerned, including the rapist--the rapist has come close enough to Munch's daughter to pin a note to her coat, and now Munch is getting threatening calls:

The phone rang again. Asia reached for it.

"No," Munch said, with more force than she had intended. Asia jumped back. Munch picked up the receiver, tried to give Asia a comforting smile, and said "Hello?"

"You have a nice house," the strangely distorted voice said. It vibrated, sounding like the voice of that robot in that old television show Lost in Space. The cadence was slow, as if the speaker needed an extra moment to prepare each word. "But you really shouldn't take the same route home every day."

Gritty, creepy in the extreme, and at times positively harrowing, Unfinished Business is a most welcome entry into the Mancini line (No Human Involved, No Offense Intended, Unwanted Company). Seranella's characters are wholly yet finely drawn, their dialogue is true, and the mounting urgency she packs into this novel's pace, particularly down the home stretch, is palpable. --Michael Hudson