 November 2005
The Company You Keep
by Angela Henry
Attention all amateur sleuths, there’s a new girl in town in Angela Henry’s debut mystery, The Company You Keep. Twenty-eight-year-old Kendra Clayton is your average sister next door. She’s making ends meet by working part-time as a GED teacher and putting in hours as a hostess at her uncle’s restaurant. She’s down to earth, laid back and a little nosy by nature. So when her friend Bernie’s boyfriend turns up dead, Kendra, of course, is curious about who did it.
It all happened so quickly. Bernie is left stranded at work because her no-good boyfriend Jordan neglects to pick her up and he has her car. Bernie asks Kendra for a ride home and she obliges. However, while en route, Bernie asks that Kendra take her to her old house, a house that she now rents out to Vanessa Brumfield, whom she suspects is having an affair with Jordan. Reluctantly, Kendra drops Bernie off at the old house. Sure enough, Bernie’s Lexus is parked outside, but Kendra does not wait around to see the drama unfold. Shortly thereafter Kendra receives a phone call from a sobbing Bernie, who says she found Jordan dead inside her old house.
Kendra jumps into her car and rushes back to Archer Street to get Bernie. Full of curiosity, Kendra checks out the crime scene and sees Jordan’s head has been brutally bashed. Did Bernie actually kill Jordan, perhaps in a fit of rage? The police seem to think so. And why did Bernie not tell the police that she knew Jordan was cheating with Vanessa? Bernie also asks that Kendra not share that information with the police either. Interestingly Vanessa, who lives in the house, is nowhere to be found. Did she kill her lover? If so, why? These questions and more trigger Kendra’s quest for answers. The author does an admirable job of developing a maze motives and means. As Kendra does some amateur investigating, secrets of the past are revealed, which create a more tangled web of potential suspects. To make matters worse, police detectives keep questioning Kendra as if she herself is a suspect. Although she never liked Jordan, she is determined to find out who killed him and clear Bernie’s name as well as her own. Hopefully, she won’t be killed in the process.
The Company You Keep is a solid debut effort. It’s not a heart-stopping thrill ride full of intrigue, but a fun little mystery with just enough twists to make it enjoyable. Some parts of the book seem unbelievable. For instance, most police detectives are not at all willing to share details of an ongoing investigation with a civilian, particularly one who may be a suspect. Other parts of the book were too coincidental, but all in all, this is a good whodunit. I look forward to seeing this author’s growth in the next installment of the Kendra Clayton series.
Reviewed by Joan Burke-Stanford for The Romer Review
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