Steve Demaree. A Body on the Porch. Amazon, 2016. E-book.
This is a lighthearted murder mystery. Cy Dekker from Hilldale, Kentucky, is vacationing in Tennessee and strikes up a conversation with a man while waiting in line to be seated at a restaurant. He tells this stranger he is a retired police detective. The stranger then says, “If I have a murder mystery to solve, I can call you.”
Dekker replies that he is retired, and would only respond “if you found a body on your front porch.”
About a week after returning from his vacation, Dekker gets a phone call from this stranger (“I don’t know why I gave him my business card”) saying that he, indeed, found a body on his front porch. Since the caller is from a town even smaller than Hilldale, Dekker keeps his word and comes to his town to solve the murder.
Dekker’s best friend is a retired police sergeant whom he recruits to help out with such cases. Lou Murdock has a unique gift which helps him solve crimes. God gives him clues. Sometimes they are dreams, sometimes they are impressions. In A Body on the Porch, they are mostly movie titles.
We get the story from Dekker’s perspective. He is a widower with a girlfriend—and a neighbor who is convinced that she is to marry him. He also likes to dine out. He is a connoisseur of American cuisine like barbecue and cheesecakes. Indeed, he and his girlfriend have decided to hold a tournament style taste test to determine, over an extended period of time, which is the best Cheesecake Factory cheesecake. So far they have sampled four but hope to sample over thirty and then take the “sweet sixteen” to the next stage.
The murder itself is unusual. It seems as though the victim was poisoned, shot, and run over by a car. Also it seems that no one really knows who the victim is. He is a relative newcomer to town, and he clearly had some secrets he was reluctant to let anyone know about. He rented an apartment on a quiet street where it seems no one knew anyone else. Yet it turns out that someone connected to him had rented the same apartment earlier and had died while he was living there.
Yes, it is an intriguing puzzle with a good number of laughs. After reading something quite heavy like Ahab’s Wife, this provided a nice escape and a little comic relief.