Minotaur
Published August 12, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Former Chicago police detective and current private investigator Annalisa Vega is surprised when her brother Alex contacts her, asking her to visit. They haven’t been close since she turned him in for murder, but she drives to his downstate Illinois prison to see him. He has a request. Another inmate, a man who used to mow her family’s lawn, claims he’s innocent of the murder that landed him in the joint, and he and Annalisa’s brother wants her to look into it. Joe Green is certain the one witness that the prosecution depended on lied, and he recently received an anonymous note backing up his claim. While it’s far from definitive proof, a PI he hired previously learned very little – except that the witness didn’t own a dog, a dog she supposedly was walking late at night when she saw the murder. An added wrinkle: it was Nick, Annalisa’s husband, who made the dubious arrest years ago. But she agrees to take the case, and it leads to a much more tangled tale than she can imagine, one tied to an unsolved case from decades ago.
The lawyer who her jailed client supposedly murdered was a lawyer who did pro bono cases for women living at a shelter for victims of domestic violence. We know from the prologue that it was a woman who let the sleazy lawyer pick her up in a bar, then led him to the lakeshore where she stabbed him before rolling him into the freezing water. But as Annalisa digs into the case, she wonders if her client may be innocent of this murder, but guilty of something else. His ex wife fled to the shelter to escape him, and his previous wife disappeared. Visits to the shelter don’t clarify anything. The woman who runs the shelter and her assistants are reluctant to help, and they are keeping secrets.
While Annalisa pursues her case, she takes on another client, a wealthy widow whose valuable engagement ring has disappeared. The only people who could have stolen it are her very good friends who get together at her home regularly, or her longtime employee who bakes delicious scones but is beginning to have issues with her memory. The client can’t believe her friends could be behind the theft, but the ring is precious to her. She wants Annalisa to find out what happened to it, regardless of the consequences.
By the end of the story, Annalisa has solved both cases, and her husband Nick is able to bring a final, lingering mystery to a surprising close.
The fifth book in this series offers a tangled but absorbing plot that can be enjoyed without having read the previous books. There are plenty of twists and surprises throughout the story. However, for those who have followed Annalisa’s previous cases, there’s a bonus: updates about her family, the state of her marriage to Nick, and the fact that she is well into a pregnancy throughout her cases, offer a rich tapestry of relationships that will be especially satisfying for regular readers of the series.