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Alone At Night

by K J Erickson

Alone At Night is the fourth mystery and fourth book published by K J Erickson in her series featuring Detective Marshall Bahr, nicknamed 'Mars' and his sidekick, Nettie Frisch. K J Erickson is a fairly new author, but her knowledge of the police procedural is evident, and the story compelling.

In Alone At Night, Mars Bahr and Nettie have been moved to a portion of their organization called the Cold Case Unit – a place where all unresolved crimes have been dumped – in the hope that the team may somehow uncover new leads and solve some of them. An initial assignment is to take on the murders of convenience store employees; and convenience stores happen to be one of Mars' favorite dislikes due to their lack of proper security and their owner's efforts to keep costs down by allowing only one individual to run the premises at night.

Investigation brings them to a sixteen-year-old missing persons case, when a young girl named Andrea Bergstad vanished without a trace from a rural Minnesota combination gas station and convenience store. A tape from the single working security camera, focused on the cash register area, shows only that she was talking on the phone to her best friend just before she left the store – walking out with the store still wide open and the lights still on. Mars travels to Redstone, Minnesota, to talk to the retired sheriff, Sig Sampson, who was on duty at the time of Andrea's disappearance.

From Sig, Mars learns that Erin Moser was Andrea's best friend, and the one she'd been talking to on the phone just before she disappeared. Sig had naturally interviewed her first. However, all Sig could discover from Erin was that 'someone was coming' and Andrea had to hang up. Erin contacted Sig later to tell him something she'd withheld, but before that could happen she'd been involved in an accident: She'd had a flat on a country road, and when she'd left the car to get help, she'd been hit by another car and killed.

Further difficulties are encountered when Mars gets a well-known TV program to air the specifics of what has by now become a nineteen-year-old mystery, and ask for the individual who called the police saying they found the convenience store empty to come forward – something they hadn't hung around for at the time of Andrea's disappearance. This is plus the fact that Andrea's parents moved to Texas a year following the time they lost their daughter.

Enter a strange person called only 'The Green Man,' a sniper in Vietnam who shot one of their own men at the order of one Alan Campbell, who is presently campaigning for the Minnesota Republican seat in the Senate. It seems that Alan Campbell had a thing for young, pretty girls, and had raped one in a Vietnam village. The major witness was the man who was shot.

When the connection between Campbell, The Green Man, and Andrea Bergstad is established, there is still no concrete evidence to support it. Then a Rhonda Billich is shot in the head when she emerges from a convenience store in South Dakota – and she's the image of Andrea Bergstad.

The Green Man had a thing about completion of any contract – which finally explained why he was still after anyone who might spoil Alan Campbell's chances for securing that Senate seat. But his method of wiping out all possible informers – and anyone who could possibly testify about Campbell's sexual proclivities – becomes his nemesis at last. Everything is eventually resolved with Andrea Bergstad's disappearance fully explained, but it takes the death of Nettie Frisch to do it.

K J Erickson has written a book that grips – forcing you to rejoice in each piece of recovered information which sees the light of day after such a hiatus of so many years. Alone At Night provides police procedurals for the reopening of any old, unsolved crime as well as pointing out the laxity of convenience store owners in rural areas due to simple greed. K
J Erickson is an author to watch.

Alan Paul Curtis

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