Minireview: Lockout, by Lillian O'Donnell

I read this wrapped in bandages, recovering from a bad upper body flash fire burn and tranked up on medication… I needed something lightweight (both contentwise and physically) to read, and my mom grabbed this from her bookshelf. While nothing all that special, it proved to be an entertaining-enough read, even in my fuzzy state of mind.

Lockout is a fairly standard police procedural, except that the protagonist is a woman. While not making a huge difference, it does add the element of her trying to adopt a child while trying to solve a case and ward off nasty repercussions brought on by her identifying a fellow police officer doing something he should not have been doing. Lieutenant Norah Mulcahaney (of NYPD) is given the case of a rock star’s brother’s death by gunshot wound – inside a locked studio with extremely limited access (thus the title of the book). The case itself is close to a classic “locked room mystery”, though not quite the puzzle piece some tales like this can be… it has more to do with the tangled social relationships between the people involved. Another source for the book title may be the shunning Mulcahaney receives from some of her fellow police officers after she fingers another officer; while some agree with her choice, many don’t, and shades of misogynism also simmer under the surface. That conflict and Norah’s quest to adopt a daughter take up as much or more of the page count as the mystery itself, which threatens to get buried in the background noise.

It was an ok book, nice light entertainment. Not good enough for me to seek out others by the same author, but by no means bad either.

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