A Perfect Victim by Patricia Dusenbury

I'm so glad I agreed to review this book. It was well worth the time. It was so good, I feel guilty having received a free copy.
I give A Perfect Victim 5 out of 5 stars, and I'm normally very stingy with stars.
I haven't read a lot of mysteries lately, I got bored with them years ago because so many of them seemed to follow a formula and were too predictable to be fun. This book however, kept me glued to my seat from cover to cover.
I won't recap the book, because it's a mystery and nobody wants spoilers with those. I will however say that the characters seemed very real and the situations they were in were very believable. The main character is a widow woman who suffers panic attacks. An underlying theme of the book is how she works her way out of being the helpless emotional cripple and becomes the strong woman she really is. She becomes one of the main suspects in a murder, and when she tries to find the culprit herself she gets herself in even deeper. Through her trials, she comes to grips with her personal demons.
I would recommend this book to readers from young adult up. It does elude to some bad life situations but there is nothing graphic. It does have a couple of foul words coming out of the mouth of one character, but I'm sure kids hear worse in school.
It looks like this book is the first of a series. I'm going to have to make time to read the next one and will be waiting to see the third come out.

About the author:

Patricia Dusenbury was one of those children who snuck a flashlight into bed and read mystery stories under the covers ‘til the wee small hours.  Despite this, she managed to acquire a degree in economics and a job that required writing as well as reading.  Now she’s become a writer, hoping to atone for those economic reports and analyses by writing stories that people read for pleasure. Uncial Press e-published A Perfect Victim in 2013 and Secrets, Lies & Homicide in 2014. A House of Her Own is scheduled for release in September,

In answer to some questions I asked her she replied:

After a lifetime on the east coast, I now live on one of the steepest hills in San Francisco - and only a block from the school where one of my grandchildren is in kindergarten.    I've always been an avid reader, especially mysteries, and writing them seemed the natural next thing.


To read more about her books and maybe get one, check out her Amazon Author page