Times Lies by Adele Polomski
by Barb Goffman
142/366
From Crime Scene: New Jersey 3 (Clued In Press 2010)
A bird bath is stolen. Police investigate and believe the owner is lying. A friend believes otherwise…
142/366
From Crime Scene: New Jersey 3 (Clued In Press 2010)
A bird bath is stolen. Police investigate and believe the owner is lying. A friend believes otherwise…
141/366
From Crime Scene: New Jersey 3 (Clued In Press 2010)
Police investigate a robbery at a drug store. Some quick thinking enables them to see the lie in someone’s story.
140/366
From Crime Scene: New Jersey 3 (Clued In Press 2010)
A rich man dies. His friends suspect foul play. The police make an arrest based on someone having done something before the man died.
The problem with this story is that the person in question would have had no reason to do the action in question if murder actually was planned.
139/366
From Crime Scene: New Jersey 3 (Clued In Press 2010)
Police are called to the scene of a bar where bad things are known to happen. Outside they find the remains of a traffic accident. Inside they find a dead man. After questioning the folks in the bar, the detective makes an arrest.
Not my favorite story. The arrest is based purely on supposition, not evidence.
138/366
From Crime Scene: New Jersey 3 (Clued In Press 2010)
A promising young artist is found dead at the bottom of a waterfall. The police investigate several possible assailants before discovering the unexpected truth.
137/366
From Crime Scene: New Jersey 3 (Clued In Press 2010).
In this story, one member of this group tells the reader all about the rest of the members of his group. You’re supposed to think one thing and then at the end realize the author meant something else. I can’t say more without ruining it.
136/366
From Crime Scene: New Jersey 3 (Clued In Press 2010)
A grandfather disappears. The grandmother won’t discuss him and won’t let her granddaughter ever look in the trunks in the attic. Guess what’s in the trunks. (Ha. It’s not him. But it’s related.)
135/366
From Crime Scene: New Jersey 3 (Clued In Press 2010)
A Dior dress is rumored to have killed a woman. Now, many years later, the truth comes out. (Hint: The dress had help!)
134/366
From Crime Scene: New Jersey 3 (Clued In Press 2010)
A man who’s smart enough to become the CEO of a major corporation somehow believes that the 1938 radio drama War of the Worlds actually happened. Yep, Martians landing, all that jazz. So he goes to the park where the Martians supposedly landed and gets kidnapped. Luckily for him, a woman who has lived in that town all her life, who believes she actually saw the Martians landing, was keeping an eye on the park at just the right time.
133/366
From Crime Scene: New Jersey 3 (Clued In Press 2010)
A beloved, well-respected man is murdered at Giants Stadium. His nephew, a police commissioner, investigates the crime (and also, unbelievably, corrupts evidence out of stupidity).
I thought this was a well-plotted story, generally, but I also felt a bit cheated. We’re in the sleuth’s head, so when he figured out whodunit, the reader should have known at that moment, too, or at least should have been given a clue that the sleuth had figured something important out by having him react to finding the key information and have the scene fade out, or something like that. Instead the reader was suddenly not privy to everything the sleuth knew, setting up a big reveal at the end.
