A review by sandygx260
Duplicity by Ingrid Thoft

5.0

I hated the first book featuring rough and tumble PI Fina Ludlow. Loyalty featured too many cliches, too much violence toward Fina (and way too miraculous recoveries from such) and too much annoying family. But there is something about Fina's character that coaxed me (or, more likely, threatened me) to read the second book. Identity is a much tighter read— as if Throft whittled down the aspects of Fina's character that made her annoying but kept the great parts. The third novel, Brutality, upped the stakes a notch.

With Duplicity, Throft deserves a five. Fina acts as aggressive and determined as ever, but even she acknowledges she's not growing any younger. Fina deals with what seems like a simple case of helping a daughter of one of her lawyer father's ex-flames decide if she should bequeath a expensive property to her evangelical church. When murder enters the church case equation, the ante is upped. When Fina's child-molesting brother Rand returns to the family fold with her parent's blessings, Fina's emotional world starts to tilt sideways.

Here Throft portrays Fina as emotionally shaken and betrayed by her already awful family. Her brothers Scott and Matt want to help, but end up acting spineless in the face of their father's control. Fina concentrates on the murder case and exposing the church as a fraud even as the emotional family pressure mounts. Throft throws well crafted red herrings to the reader—at one point I couldn't guess who had committed the murder. But it's the monumental family revelations—not one, but two— that kick both Fina and the reader in the heart. That's why this novel deserves the five stars.

It also sets up a whopper of a problem for the next novel. I'm sure it will be a wild ride!