Knee-deep in murder, secrets, bigamy

By Mary Monroe

Dafina Books. 320 pp. $24.

Reviewed by

Karen E. Quiñones Miller

It's senior prom night, and best friends Dolores Reese and Valerie Proctor are dressed in expensive dresses, hair stunning, nails perfectly manicured. But instead of heading out the door with their respective dates, they're dragging the dead body of Valerie's stepfather out of the kitchen and into Valerie's fenced backyard for a late-night burial.

No, I'm not giving away any fine plot points of Mary Monroe's latest novel,

She Had It Coming

- all of this happens on the first page. And the drama builds from there. Valerie confides to Dolores that she stabbed the abusive Zeke Proctor with a butcher knife after he threatened to kill her mother. Though shaken and confused, Dolores swears she'll carry the secret of the murder to her own grave.

Now, 16 years later, it's Dolores with a crucial secret, and Valerie to whom she turns to for help.

Die-hard fans of Monroe's know murder has been a familiar theme in the New York Times best-selling author's novels, including

The Upper Room

,

God Don't Like Ugly

, and

Deliver Me From Evil

. In

She Had It Coming

, while the murder may be the linchpin that holds the plot together, it's not the main focus of the book.

Dolores is a foster child happily taken in by kind but elderly Christians who happen to live next door to the Proctors. When she falls in love with another foster child, Floyd Watson, her foster family and her friends warn her away from him, saying he's a kid headed for trouble. Their warnings seem to be on point when Floyd is accused of raping and murdering a young girl and is sentenced to life in prison.

But Dolores is convinced of his innocence, and even though Floyd is resigned to his fate and encourages her to move on with her life, she steadfastly stands by him, visiting him every month and swearing her undying love.

She manages to stay faithful to Floyd for more than a decade, but then she meets Paul Dunne, a successful businessman who comes from a "good" family and can give her the kind of life she's always dreamed about. She soon finds herself falling in love with him, though still in love with Floyd, and she decides not to let Floyd know about her new relationship for fear that in his already depressed state it might send him over the edge. She doesn't even let Floyd know when she agrees to marry Paul, reasoning he'll never find out anyway since he's incarcerated for life and has no other real contact with the outside world.

Lo and behold, shortly after her marriage to Paul, Floyd asks her to marry him. Not knowing how to say no without revealing her already married status, she consents, again reasoning he'll never learn of her deception since he'll never step foot outside of prison.

So imagine her surprise when she gets a phone call from Floyd saying he's on his way home. New evidence has turned up that proves his innocence.

For readers who may think Dolores unwise for getting involved with a murder she didn't commit, she now shows she's the queen of stupid choices. She doesn't want to give up her luxurious lifestyle with Paul, but she's never been able to get Floyd out of her blood. So instead of coming clean, Dolores decides she's going to stay married to both.

Doing this means maintaining two households, and a lot of fancy juggling. To pull this off, she turns to her childhood friend, Valerie. After all, there's no way Valerie is going to reveal her duplicity after Dolores has kept Valerie's own secret for 16 years. Right?

There are times when

She Had It Coming

seems contrived, and others when it seems too predictable. And there aren't any characters in the novel I could find myself rooting for - they were all unsympathetic. Nonetheless, Monroe is a masterful storyteller, and readers will find themselves turning pages long after they want to put the book down - because they're already so drawn in they can't bear not finding out what happens next.