Review: The Dead Key by D.M. Pulley

The Dead Key 
By D.M. Pulley 
Published by Thomas and Mercer (an Amazon imprint), 2015
Free as part of Amazon Kindle First for Prime members 
Link: Amazon 
Rating: Four Stars (out of five)

I enjoyed the The Dead Key more than any Kindle First book I’ve read since joining Prime a year or so ago (I should note that they tend to sit unread on my Kindle for longer than other books, since they’re free).  It had a lot going for it, in my, erm, book: it’s a mystery, it centers on two female protagonists, and it moves back and forth between two connected stories set twenty years apart.  In spite of a slow start, I was drawn into the story and by halfway through, I had trouble putting the book down.

The more recent (1998) story focuses on Iris, a young engineer assigned to draw plans of the defunct First Bank of Cleveland (FBoC).  Iris discovers that the bank had suddenly shut down twenty years before and that the vault is full of unclaimed safety deposit boxes.  Why?  And what does the FBoC’s closure have to do with Iris’s engineering firm?  This is what Iris wants to find out.  We also follow the adventures of Beatrice Baker, who in 1978 goes to work at the FBoC and uncovers a web of intrigue, fraud, and corruption, some of which concerns her personally.  By the novel’s end, both women face serious danger.  Will they survive?

Overall, I found myself drawn more to Beatrice than to Iris.  Beatrice is very young—only sixteen—and has to lie about her age to get her job at the bank.  While we eventually find out why she did this, I’d like to have learned more about her background.  She’s vulnerable and sweet but not stupid, and I found her interesting.  Iris, on the other hand, is harder to root for.  She drinks a lot and, while she recognizes that it’s a problem, she doesn’t seek help and even drives drunk.  Because her drinking seemed like a plot device and an afterthought more than a trait that drives her character, this got in the way of her likability for me.  I still found her story interesting, but that was more because of the situation in which she found herself than because I cared about her personally.

I’m a big fan of books that combine a present-day story with a historical story (though it’s hard to call 1998 “present-day” and I’m sure my parents would object to the labeling of 1978 as “historical”).  It’s easy to do this badly, but Pulley handles the dual plots quite well, keeping up the tension in both and making it clear from the beginning how they relate.  The plotting and storytelling are excellent, and overall I enjoyed this book very much and would read more of the author’s work.