Bunny's Reviews: Old Sins Review Spotlight

Welcome to the book tour for Old Sins by Lynne Handy! Read on for more details and exclusive excerpt!

Prepare to be taken across the seas to the picturesque Ireland in Old Sins as Lynne Handy unfolds a mystery that will take you into the past to reveal it's dark origins.

Maria Pell is currently residing in an Irish village working on creating new poetry and studying prehistoric people. For the most part, all seems well in this quiet little village...as long as you're willing to ignore the bizarre neighbor next door. He owns the cottage she's staying in, so that's a bit hard to do. But we must always do our best, yes?

Things take a dark twist though when a young girl goes missing and is found murdered. Who could have done this heinous crime? Why was the young girl targetted? These questions and more will pummel the people of this small village, but more is to come unfortunately. This once quiet village is going to be rocked again and again as someone is intent on hurting the people who live there. If Maria isn't careful she just might end up being one of the many victims.

Old Sins is a mystery novel that will grab you from the beginning and keep you coming back to find out what happens next. The start of this book is shocking and revealing at the same time. Then you're pushed to go deeper with Maria. What Maria experienced as a child has molded her into the individual that she is in the story.

Maria is really an interesting character. She's complex without being overly so. She's flawed and acknowledges this frequently throughout this book. She tries not to let hypocracy blind her, but there are moments when it does blind her a little.

The twisted nature of the mystery in this book will have you page-turning as more girls go missing. With the appearance of Maria's "estranged beau" new information gets brought to light. While there might be tension and drama between them, he definitely brings a fresh set of eyes to the situation at hand.

As this puzzle of a story begins to come together, pay close attention. The author is dropping clues here and there to lead you to who the culprit is. On one hand, I found it hard to believe, but on the other hand...my jaw was just on the floor. The title ties into the story beautifully.

This book absolutely engaged me from beginning to end. The author wrote an exceptional story with engaging characters. I look forward to more of this author's work in the future. I'm choosing to rate this book 5 out of 5 stars.

Thank you to the author, Lynne Handy, and R&R Book Tours for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Keep reading for an excerpt from this novel and be sure to check out my fellow bloggers as they share their thoughts on this novel.

Old Sins (A Maria Pell Mystery)

Publication Date: August 23rd, 2022

Genre: Thriller

Battered by her archeologist lover’s betrayal, poet Maria Pell flees to an Irish village to study prehistoric people and write her next volume of poetry, but her sanctuary is invaded first by her moody cousin and then by her Togolese lover who unexpectedly show up on her doorstep. When the discovery of a girl’s body on a rocky shore reawakens Maria’s devastating childhood memory of finding a dead baby floating in a stream, her days become haunted by this child’s death. As teenage girls disappear, villagers are terrified that sex-traffickers are targeting their community. With crimes to be solved, both past and present, Maria risks her life to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Excerpt

In the summer of 1988 when I was ten, I found a baby girl caught in the cattails of a stream running through my parents’ property. At first, I thought she was another baby Moses waiting to be discovered in the bulrushes. It was when I knelt to free her from the fronds that I saw her ashen face, her vacant eyes, and knew she was dead.

I see it all in slow motion now: I, in a yellow sundress, scrambling to my feet, knowing something was horribly wrong that a baby had been thrown in the creek. I ran toward my house crying, “There’s a dead baby in the creek!”

My academician father was sitting in the porch swing, reading a newspaper. He threw it down and came running. The kitchen door banged behind my mother. “John? What is it?”

I ran to her and pressed my face against her chest.“It’s a dead baby,” I sobbed.“She’s wearing a pink dress.”

“A pink dress?”

My mother folded her arms around me and stared after my father, who admonished her to stay where she was. I’m sure my mother looked at the baby afterward, but not on the day that I found her.

No one ever claimed her. No one ever admitted throwing her in the creek. The town called her Baby Doe. The coroner said she’d been alive when she went in the water. She had been a throwaway child. Until finding her, I had not known that children could be so unloved they would be discarded. I was so distressed that my parents sent me to a psychiatrist who told my mother that I had merged my psyche with that of the unwanted infant and feared no one would ever want me.

How many times during my childhood had my mother asked if I knew how much she and my father loved me? Taken literally, it was a difficult question to answer, so I had kept silent. How do you measure love? Fear of abandonment helped form the woman I became, and in some ways, I remained stuck emotionally in my tenth year.

Available on Amazon

About the Author

The eldest child in a farm family, I grew up in western Indiana where the tall corn drove me inward to create fantasy worlds. Books were my salvation. I was drawn to poetry in the beginning. Wordsworth and other poets taught me that metaphor, sound, and cadence made a good poem. From authors like Dickens, I learned that rhythmic sentences advanced plot. Hemingway taught me about verbs. Upon graduating from library school, I worked as a librarian in Illinois, Texas, and Michigan. In retirement, I co-founded Open Sky Poets, a collaboration of poets in the western suburbs of Chicago, and published poems and short stories in literary journals. I self-published three novels—two are mysteries. Current projects involve a mystery series with author Jake Westin, who, like Christie’s Miss Marple, somehow lands in the middle of murder investigations. I live in a brick house with roses in front and two rescue dogs who bark at passersby.

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