A Matter of Trust by Lis Wiehl

When life is murder, who can you trust?

One minute Mia Quinn is in her basement, chatting on the phone with a colleague at the prosecutor’s office. The next minute there’s a gunshot over the line, and Mia listens in horror as her colleague and friend Colleen bleeds to death.

Mia’s a natural for heading up the murder investigation, but these days she has all she can do to hold her life together. As a new widow with a pile of debts, a troubled teenaged son, and a four-year-old who wakes up screaming at night, she needs more time with her family, not less—and working Colleen’s case will be especially demanding. But Colleen was her friend, and she needs to keep her job. So she reluctantly teams up with detective Charlie Carlson to investigate Colleen’s death. But the deeper they dig, the more complications unfold—even the unsettling possibility that someone may be coming after her.

A Matter of Trust was an excellent novel filled with mystery, suspense, hints of romance, and conflict. The storyline was very interesting and kept me glued to the pages. There was not a lot of Christian themes or mentions of God in this novel, but overall the plot line did have an inspirational feel. I thought that this novel did a wonderful job pointing out the danger of cyber-bullying and how it can cause children and teenagers to take their own lives. The mystery, suspense, and writing of this novel were superb, however, and I enjoyed the entire novel tremendously. I felt that Matter of Trust was more like Lis Wiehl's Triple Threat series and seemed more like her style of writing than her East Salem Series. The plot was told from the perspective of Mia Quinn with a few sections from the point of view of Charlie Carlson, the police detective working with Mia and a few parts told from the perspective of Gabe, her son.

The characters in Matter of Trust were realistic and did have some dimension. I was able to identify with the struggles of Mia, the main character, and I enjoyed seeing her learn more about being a single parent and grow into a better understanding of her role at her work. Charlie was a more enigmatic character and not very much was revealed about his characteristics. It would have been great if his character had been given a little more dimension so that the readers could watch him grow and change throughout the course of the novel. Gabe, Mia's son, while not a central character, was very realistic, and it was interesting to see him grow into his role as a man as he learned about respect, honor, and being responsible for one's actions.

Overall, I enjoyed Matter of Trust tremendously. I found the storyline to be excellent, the themes to be convicting and troubling, and the characters to be realistic and to have a decent amount of development.

I received this novel for free from Thomas Nelson Publishers through Booksneeze.com in exchange for an honest review.