The usually safe town of Lackenby, Illinois, battered by a sudden series of murders, has become an uneasy place, where no one can be sure that he or she is not the next target of the killer — or killers — presently running rings around local investigators. Police Chief Joe Weiss, once of the New York City Homicide Division, is stymied by the fast-paced occurrence of apparently unrelated killings. Lackenby is not a town frequented by that kind of violence. Weiss needs answers, but he isn't even sure of the questions as he calls on an old friend at State Line University, a professor in the behavioral sciences whose career history includes extensive military investigative work.
Matt Shea welcomes his friend's invitation, and the two settle down to the business of finding a pattern, if any, to the widely diverse murders, with Weiss's hard-pressed staff as their sole back-up — until a well-meaning group of Shea's students complicates the process even further, turning the streets of Lackenby into a shooting gallery in which they become prime targets.
Lackenby was once the dynamo that drove the state's economy in high gear for the better part of the century critical to the development of the United States as a major world power. Heart of a steel industry that stretched from South Chicago on the northwest, to Indiana Harbor on the east, Lackenby was a hybrid community, part bedroom, part factory, that housed workers who labored in the steel mills and support industries of Chicago, Illinois, Gary and East Chicago, Indiana, or in the equally significant petroleum refining industry of Whiting, Indiana, and surrounding communities.
Although the flight of steel has left the area in a devastating economic decline, Lackenby survives, partly because of the tenacity of the multi-hyphenated Americans who made the region thrive in the first place, and partly because of the academic reputation of Lackenby-based State Line University, the most significant remaining economic stimulus to the community and its immediate neighbors on both sides of the Illinois-Indiana state line.
But the present murder wave is a phenomenon like nothing the community or the university have experienced before. Bodies of students and non-students have turned up with too great frequency, killed in too many different ways for residents to feel that there is any predictability, something that they might be able to take logical precautions against. Even as Weiss and Shea take up the battle, violent death continues to strike down apparently randomly selected victims, sometimes practically within their view.
Before any resolution is achieved, people precious to the protagonists will be put at great risk, and difficult questions will be raised about the limits of one's responsibility to anticipate and prevent the kind of crimes that have shattered the peace of this solid community.
An extraordinarily well constructed mystery, DEGREES OF MURDER will hold the reader's attention riveted . . . complexity and depth . . . a classic. -- Senior Editor, WordWeaving.com, December 7, 2001
Murphy creates almost a modern day American Poirot, as Weiss and Shea puzzle their way through serial homicides. -- Midwest Book Review, September, 2001
