Hello, Transcriber

September 15, 2021
Morrissey's atmospheric suspense debut introduces a troubled female police transcriber who goes beyond her job description to solve a drug case. Gritty Black Harbor, Wisconsin, is a small city with big-city crime, the kind of place "that not only keeps decent people just racing past on the highway but attracts criminals and seedy characters who need somewhere to hide." Newly hired police transcriber and aspiring writer Hazel Greenlee works the night shift, transcribing incident reports. On one of her first evenings, she's horrified when her next-door neighbor Sam approaches her office and writes a message on the frosted window: "I hid a body." The finger he uses is not his own. The following night, Hazel is startled to receive a report from Investigator Nikolai Kole, who had been suspended from the force six months earlier. She learns that Sam's confession is tied to the overdose death of a 9-year-old boy at the hands of pill pusher Tyler Krejarek. When Hazel meets the "criminally attractive" Nik, she soon gets drawn into the investigation and a steamy affair despite being married to the controlling, gun-loving Tommy. As a former police transcriber, the author writes what she knows. It's a shame she doesn't explore this unusual law enforcement world in further detail. What starts out as an intriguing police procedural gets sidetracked into romantic suspense (plenty of sex but not much suspense), mixed up with some marital and family drama, and topped with a bit of an unreliable narrator. The overwritten prose with its excessive use of similes doesn't help. People's faces are too often compared to punctuation marks ("The vulpine lady's smile deepened, a pair of parentheses framing her lurid red lips"). An intriguing premise, but the execution needs improvement.

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September 27, 2021
Aspiring novelist Hazel Greenlee, the narrator of Morrissey’s solid debut, takes a transcription job with the Black Harbor, Wis., police department, hoping to minimize time spent with her domineering husband and inspire her fiction. Hazel knows the impoverished city has a high crime rate but is still shocked when her neighbor’s 26-year-old son, Sam Samson, appears at the precinct and confesses to hiding a body. In typing reports for the investigator on the case, Nik Kole, Hazel learns that Sam allegedly helped drug dealer Tyler Krejarek carry a nine-year-old boy to a dumpster after the child overdosed on Oxycodone in Tyler’s apartment. Tyler then fled. Intrigued, Hazel chats up Nik, who enlists her assistance in an unsanctioned search. Attraction sparks, triggering decisions that endanger Hazel’s marriage, employment, and safety. Despite an overwritten opening and some shaggy plotting, this mystery largely succeeds thanks to its strong sense of place and realistically flawed heroine. Hazel’s thorny relationships provide regular infusions of tension that catapult the tale to a dramatic close. Morrissey is off to a promising start. Agent: Sharon Pelletier, Dystel, Goderich & Bourret.

Starred review from August 1, 2021

Police transcriber Hazel Greenlee wants out of crime-slicked Black Harbor, WI, so when a neighbor confesses to hiding the body of an overdose victim and the police suspect that a nefarious drug dealer called the Candy Man is responsible for the death, Hazel follows the case eagerly. She's collecting material for a novel, but her obsessiveness could be wrecking her life--and placing her squarely in the killer's sights. Let's hope that debut novelist Morrissey, a police transcriber herself, was more careful. With a 50,000-copy first printing.

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