I grabbed Windy City Dying by Chicago based mystery writer Eleanor Taylor Bland off my shelf, where it had been sitting for some time now. It's one of those books that don't cry out for me to read them; there's no urgency after I get them. But once I do, I find that they are really well crafted mysteries with good characters and (for me) familiar settings.

(I noticed the same thing when I finally pulled one of David J. Walker's mysteries, Applaud The Hollow Ghost, off the shelf and dove in. Getting started, actually opening the cover, was the hardest thing about reading it, and once I started I wanted to keep reading. Same thing with Bland's book.)

This novel is an interesting plot set in a suburb of Chicago, where Bland's detective, Marti McAlister, catches a case where a young girl is found murdered in her foster family's home. Another foster child in the house is found over the body with her blood on his hands. The kid has a history of fighting and of not getting along with other kids, but there was nothing obvious leading up to this crime.

The foster family that both young people are part of is that of an Hispanic attorney who is running for public office. (Both kids are Hispanic, also.) Bland's heroine is African-American (as is Bland herself), and minority-issue-related themes run through the narrative. Anyway, the attorney is determined to put enough pressure on the detectives, through their temporary superior officer,to make sure that the investigation was done properly, and not just rushed through like he feels most minority-involved investigations go.

The characters are well drawn, if occasionally a bit cliched. There's the jerk who's temporarily in charge of our detectives, there's the street wise older detective partnered with the African American female detective who is trying to balance raising her daughter with the demands of her job, and there is the passionate spokesman for the minorities who is on the victim side of the crime. And then there are the settings, which are even more fun to read about when they are familiar to the reader.

This novel was a solid read for me, and I will probably look for more of Bland's work. I felt very comfortable with her writing style and her plotting. It's the sort of story I tend to like, where the past is reverberating into and affecting the present, with interesting side stories happening at the same time. It probably would have been even better if I had read the other books before it in the series, of which there are apparently nine.