Teaser Tuesday: Bones of Contention by Jeanne Matthews

"Did you have a guilty mind when you watched Dez Fisher die?"

"I thought I was doin' the world a service."

~~~Page 294

Title: Bones of Contention

Author: Jeanne Matthews

ISBN: 9781590587300

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press/2010

Pages: 304

Set in the Australian outback, with a family as dysfunctional as they get, Bones of Contention manages to hold our interest. With the underlying tensions and a couple of unrelated murders thrown in, the reader is kept guessing.

Dinah Pelerin has lost her job and also her boyfriend when she gets a call from her uncle, Cleon Dodds, in a God forsaken place in Australia, to join him and his entire family. There he intends to rewrite his will and then commit suicide, as he suffers from cancer. He needs help from a rogue doctor, who will help him to kill himself. Dinah too needs to find out about her father, who had died in her childhood. He was supposedly a felon.

Dinah's half brother Lucien is Cleon's son and she is very close to him. A murder has already been committed in an island nearby and then another murder happens right in front of everyone's eyes. Dinah senses something has been hidden from her for too long. She starts to investigate in her amateur way and finds skeletons tumbling out of cupboards. Everyone in the family has something to hide. And then Dinah hits upon something very big, which jolts her. It is now on her as to what family secrets she can let out and which ones she has to hide.

Bones of Contention touches the aborigine myths, and their various rituals. That part was very interesting. Dinah is no detective yet she persists in finding out the motive and the murderer. Each member of the family is not really what they seem to be. It took me a while to get into the Australian lingua. Once I did I read it very fast. It moves forward with wit and humour. It is the first in the Dinah Pelerin Mystery series.