Finding kids leads to finding murder

Police, not private detectives, investigate murders, making it a challenge for authors attempting to write a murder mystery with a private investigator (or any amateur sleuth) as the protagonist. The hero need not just solve the mystery but get involved in the case in the first place.

Laura Lippman solves this problem neatly in Butchers Hill, one of her earliest Tess Monaghan mysteries published in 1998. Butchers Hill is a neighborhood in southeast Baltimore where Tess opens her new office and where Luther Beale, a man call the Butcher of Butcher Hill, becomes one of her clients. Years earlier, angered at being harassed by a group of neighborhood kids, all foster children with little supervision, had fired a gun to scare them off. One child died of a bullet wound, and Beale served his time. He hires Tess to find the other children, now older teens, saying he wants to give them each an anonymous financial gift.

Tess then gets a second case, also involving finding a child. A woman wants her to locate the daughter she gave up for adoption years before. Now having regrets, she says just she want to know her child is OK and, if possible, do something for her.

Both cases seem like easy money to Tess. We know this isn't likely, and sure enough both cases soon blow up in her face. Most seriously, after a break-in at her office, kids she has found for Beale start dying in suspicious ways. The police suspect Beale but have no evidence. Tess suspects him, too, but decides to check out his claim that not only didn't he kill these children but neither was he responsible for the death that sent him to prison. He claims that fatal shot came from a passing car. And so, through the backdoor, Tess gets involved in a murder case.

Lippman delivers thrills and surprises, even in the adopted child case. I dare not say much about that one without being a spoiler.