Review: The Ways of the Dead by Neely Tucker

The Ways of the Dead

by Neely Tucker

Publisher: Viking Adult

Pages: 288

Format: eARC 

Buy the Book: Amazon

Goodreads:  When the teenage daughter of a powerful Washington, D.C., judge is found dead, three local black kids are arrested for her murder—but reporter Sully Carter suspects there’s more to the case. From the city’s grittiest backstreets to the elegant halls of power, wry yet wounded Sully pursues a string of cold cases, all the while fighting against pressure from government officials, police, suspicious locals, and his own bosses at the newspaper. Based on the real-life 1990s Princeton Place murders, Neely Tucker’s debut novel is a pitch-perfect rendering of a fast-paced newsroom and a layered, edge-of-your-seat mystery sure to please fans of Elmore Leonard and George Pelecanos.


Kritters Thoughts:  Fiction based on truth gets me every time!  Neely Tucker takes the true story of murders that occurred in DC and weaves them into a fictional tale.  Sully, a journalist who has recently returned from war reporting is thrust back into city dramatics with the murder of a high ranking official's daughter.  Although her murder looks isolated, Sully believes that it is one in a string and is out to prove it.

The plot was perfect and the characters were fantastically portrayed.  Sully interacted with the professionals at his paper and the characters on the street with ease and I felt the truth in it.  I loved his myriad of sources and meeting them and getting not only the information for the murders, but to learn about them was fantastic.  

The other part that made me a fan was the fantastic plot twist at the end.  The reader thinks that everything is buttoning up just so and then the character gets one more piece of information and it sets everything into a different place - loved it!

The one thing that kept tripping me up were the journalism terms - the deadlines and submission terms that were used throughout the book.  I may have had to gloss over those, but they only distracted from the story a little bit.  I don't know that there is a way to avoid it because coming from a journalist's point of view, it helped create the atmosphere.

I will be looking out for more from Neely Tucker, adding him to my favorites list!

Rating: absolutely loved it and want a sequel

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I received one copy of this book free of charge from Penguin.  I was not required to write a positive review in exchange for receipt of the book; rather, the opinions expressed in this review are my own.