Murder Happens

Solving murders isn’t part of Devin Cleary’s job description. As a security guard at Lincoln Court, a small boutique shopping mall in Urbana, Illinois, he has busted shoplifters, prevented the homeless from making the mall their home, and even rousted a few bathroom dope-smokers. When the mall becomes the site of multiple murders, Cleary is caught up in a web of intrigue that may involve a contractor’s ambitions for redeveloping Lincoln Court into a megamall. He is positioned to sniff out clues that the police miss. By the world’s standards, Devin Cleary is a loser. He’s a college dropout. His lawyer wife left him for a colleague in her law firm. He has spent the last fifteen years in a minimum-wage, dead-end job that barely keeps him afloat. With no college degree, virtually no marketable skills, and the mall on the brink of closing for lack of business, Cleary wonders if he faces a future of sleeping outdoors in cardboard boxes and rummaging in dumpsters for meals. The only hope for Lincoln Court’s survival lies with that contractor’s plans, which the owners of the mall oppose, and on support for them, if elected, of a candidate for governor who sets up campaign headquarters there–until those murders cast a pall over that hope. As he tries to solve them, Cleary finds himself increasingly at risk. He survives encounters with a mobster and his former mother-in-law, a knockout punch, frenzied Black Friday bargain hunters, a shooting spree, painful self-discovery, and, after unraveling a tangled skein of means, motive, and opportunity, a face-to-face encounter with the murderer. More than a mystery, “Murder Happens” is about a man out to prove, if only to himself, that his life has value in ways that the prevailing standards of the world don’t take into account.