Murder on Air

Bussemeier has done his homework, and it shows in every scene. This is late-1950s LaSalle Harbor rendered with the texture of a man who's read his period sources — Fidelipac cartridges, Sippy diets for peptic ulcers, the specific mechanics of an AM radio tower's two-thousand-volt charge, the exact model year of a Crestline with mismatched fender skirts. The detail never feels like research dumped on the page; it's deployed through procedure, the way North actually works a case (calling the DMV, chasing a car description, tracing a locker key). That's period mystery done right — texture in service of plot, not the other way around.

The book's strongest structural move is the double-murder hook: Cat Casey's stalker calls escalate into her killing, and then, before the reader can settle, a second body turns up electrocuted at the transmitter shed with a Clint Walker business card in his pocket. North's dry deduction — 'Both in the same place on the same night. Hard to believe it could be a coincidence' — sets a clean engine running under the prose.

North himself is the book's best asset: reluctant Acting Chief, unsentimental with grieving husbands ('I said that his wife was found dead this morning... Clear and to the point'), and quietly guilty about Suzette in the bed he once shared with Ruth. That's a real man with real friction, not a cardboard gumshoe. Franks going pale over the excised heart, Tiffin's sleep-deprived comic relief — these beats land because Bussemeier trusts small human moments to do the heavy lifting. The heart-removal reveal is the genuine 'didn't see it coming' swerve the genre demands, and it's delivered with restraint rather than gore-for-gore's-sake.