Skeletons in My Closet: Life Lessons from a Homicide Detective by Dave SweetMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
The August choice for my in-person book club. Written by two local authors, it seemed a natural choice, but this Covid-19 year has been anything but normal. I had met one co-author, Sarah, at a conference last year and asked if she & Dave would be willing to come talk to our book club about their process. We've had to postpone for quite a while, but hope to achieve the meeting this week.
A self-help style book with an interesting angle, that of an experienced homicide detective. Although he describes the Calgary cases in anonymous form, I recognized several of them which dominated our local news at the time. I've attended one of Dave's crime sessions at our local writers conference and he does a good job of teaching authors of crime fiction what real crime scenes are like. I remember a concluding quiz: he gave us a photo & some crime details, and we were to decide cause of death. Natural causes, homicide, suicide, accidental or undetermined. It was an interesting way to solidify the concepts in our minds.
That's the best aspect of this book, using policing experience to teach the life skills that can benefit everyone. Any habitual reader in the self help genre will recognize many of the “lessons" and identify with some of the situations. I know through conversations with my sisters that we have all three benefitted from this kind of literature, having come from a rather sheltered background and having our naivety make us vulnerable to manipulation.
I'll be very interested in talking with the authors about their shared experience in the writing of it.
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