During his visit to the office, Walker witnesses a quarrel between a Valley Forest sales executive and Samuel Spender, the leader of an environmental group opposed to any further development in the area.Later that day, he discovers Spender’s body in a local creek. Walker calls the police, and he’s soon interviewed about his discovery. He thinks that’s more or less the end of his involvement but that’s not to be so.

Not long after his grisly discovery, Walker and his wife are doing some shopping when he happens to spy a purse left in a shopping cart. Thinking it belongs to his wife, he’s intending to give it back to her and takes it. It’s only later that he realises that it doesn’t belong to Sarah at all. Then Walker finds that the owner is Stefanie Knight, who works at the sales office of Valley Forest Estates. Walker tries to return it, but that only gets him more deeply involved in what’s going on in this quiet suburb when he finds that Knight has been murdered. And then he discovers the huge wad of cash that was also in the purse.Before Walker knows it, he’s been targeted by some very nasty people. He manages to put the pieces together and find out how the two dead bodies and the money are related, but not before he runs the real risk of being the next victim.

One of the important elements in this novel is irony, both humourous and sometimes a little bitter. For example, Walker and his family move into the suburbs because he’s very concerned about everyone’s safety. And yet, ironically, the Walker family ends up in much more danger after they move than they ever faced while living in the city. Walker wants to avoid dangerous situations and ironically, he finds Spender’s and Knight’s bodies and his very attempts to stay out of the dangerous situations he finds himself in only bring more danger.

There’s another level of irony, too. Walker soon gets to know his new neighbours in suburbia and finds out things about two of them that make him wonder whether he can really trust them. I can’t say more about this aspect without giving away spoilers, but suffice it to say that they are multi-dimensional. And yet ironically, it’s those very people of whom Walker is suspicious who help him and his family when they need it the most.

There’s also an element of the absurd in this novel, both in its more traditional sense and in its other sense of ridiculously humourous.

The mystery itself is believable, with credible motives for murder, and there’s a very, very neat twist at the end of it. A sometimes darkly-humourous “suburban murder” story with more than a touch of irony and absurdity, Bad Move also contains some interesting characters whom we can care about once we know them. 

Review by Margot Kinberg, Confessions of a Mystery Novelist