Book review: The Dead Key by D. M. Pulley

The thirty-sixth book I read in 2015 was The Dead Key by D. M. Pulley.  Once a month, I'm offered a free e-book to download for my Kindle as an Amazon Prime member, and this was one of them for February.  Many months, none of the selections piques my interest, but for the low, low price of free, I was willing to give this one a try.

The book is set in the First Bank of Cleveland, both in 1978, when it's a bustling high-rise, and in 1998, when it's a derelict building, on the verge of renovation.  Our heroines are two, as well: Beatrice, a young secretary in 1978, and Iris, a recently-minted structural engineer drawing up a floor plan for the building's owners.  The two women are at either end of a mystery involving the sudden closure of the bank and the fate of unclaimed safety deposit boxes.

This was an exciting read.  There was one error in which one of the protagonists was called by the other one's name.  There were a couple of completely unnecessary sex scenes, which were doubly annoying due to the Hollywood/romance novel convention that the sexiness of an encounter is inversely proportional to the physical discomfort its location involves (desks, kitchen counters, stairs, etc.).  In this case, it was the bare tile floor of a bathroom.  The bathroom is directly off an office with normal furniture, presumably including some sort of couch, but, no, they go at it on the hard, cold tile floor. That can't be comfortable for either one of them.

The resolution of the mystery doesn't quite manage to measure up to my expectations, and I felt the author pulled her punches in exactly who ends up dead.  Still, it was an enjoyable read.  This is D. M. Pulley's first novel, and I'll certainly give an interested glance at her second.