Caught in the Shadows: A Mystery (First Edition)

Hired by the lawyers of a Chicago socialite to use her computer expertise to dig up dirt on the socialite's murdered husband, Becky Belski discovers a dark secret involving the victim's father and Becky's own mother

YA-- Elizabeth Diane Peters McKennah Belski has a secret that even she doesn't suspect she has. Growing up as the adopted daughter and only child of spinster Winnie McKennah, Elizabeth (or Becky, as her new mother insists on calling her) always knew that her birth mother killed her stepfather and later died while serving a four-year prison sentence. With wit and charm, Becky briefly recounts her pleasant life with Winnie and wryly describes her marriage to Yuri Belski. Only after her divorce when she takes a job with a computer investigation firm does she stumble back into her past. She concludes that she must clear her mother's name, something she couldn't do as a five-year-old on the witness stand. As she gets nearer to the truth, Becky finds both a new love and the joy of having a brother again. Haddad keeps readers wondering about the real murderer's identity right up until the end, concluding with the reunion of the long-lost mother and her daughter. This book has a good plot, likable characters, and a strong story.
- Carolyn E. Gecan, Thomas Jefferson Sci-Tech, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A messy divorce in the affluent suburbs of Chicago's North Shore yields a plum assignment for computer hacker Becky Belski and leads to the real mystery in this tight, intriguing tale: the redoubtable Becky's own troubled past. Working on the divorce case for an Evanston, Ill., company engaged in dubiously legal information retrieval, Becky comes across the name of a stepbrother and is suddenly preoccupied by a history she has not thought about for years. When Becky was five, her mother was convicted of murdering her stepfather; Becky was sent to Iowa, where she was soon adopted and her name changed. Becky's older stepbrothers still live nearby; the elder, cold and secretive, tells Becky her mother is dead; the younger is attracted to her. In crisp prose marked by economical humor, Haddad ( The Academic Factor ) underplays Becky's early traumas as over time her vaguely recalled past is replaced by a real one and she is required finally to be brave, rather than simply dogged and endearingly plucky.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Computer sleuth Becky Belski, of the Chicago consulting/snooping firm Resources, is called in to dish the dirt on Daryl and Lionel Aberdeen, a pair of socialites whose marriage went sour when (or even before) Daryl shot Lionel. But Becky's job--to find enough secrets for Daryl's lawyer, Bellini Reese, to keep the divorce out of the courtroom altogether--is swiftly eclipsed when she realizes that William Townsend, father of Aberdeen intimates Alan and Bill II, was killed 25 years ago by his second wife, Becky's own mother, only a few years after Townsend's own first wife died in a suspicious accident. Using her Aberdeen contacts--especially her oblivious half-brother Bill, who becomes the unlikely rival to a klutzy Reese associate, Michael Rosen, for her affections--Becky finds herself digging deeper into her own family mystery. The tangled-yet-obvious Townsend case, whose connection with the Aberdeens is pretty slight, ends up running away with the book, but Haddad (The Academic Factor, 1980, etc.) has made Becky appealingly hardheaded. It's a shame she doesn't seem due for an encore. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.