Hello, Transcriber
(Black Harbor Novels Book 1)
by Hannah Morrissey
Amazon / B&N / Apple / GP / BB
Hannah Morrissey’s Hello, Transcriber is a captivating mystery suspense debut featuring a female police transcriber who goes beyond the limits to solve a harrowing case.
Every night, while the street lamps shed the only light on Wisconsin’s most crime-ridden city, police transcriber Hazel Greenlee listens as detectives divulge Black Harbor’s gruesome secrets. As an aspiring writer, Hazel believes that writing a novel could be her only ticket out of this frozen hellscape. And then her neighbor confesses to hiding the body of an overdose victim in a dumpster.
The suspicious death is linked to Candy Man, a notorious drug dealer. Now Hazel has a first-row seat to the investigation and becomes captivated by the lead detective, Nikolai Kole. Intrigued by the prospects of gathering eyewitness intel for her book, Hazel joins Kole in exploring Black Harbor’s darkest side. As the investigation unfolds, Hazel will learn just how far she’ll go for a good story―even if it means destroying her marriage and luring the killer to her as she plunges deeper into the city she’s desperate to claw her way out of.
My Rating:
Favorite Quotes:
His head moves in small jerks, like a robot malfunctioning at the end of its battery life.
Old Will reminds me of a twentieth-century Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep at the end of the Vietnam War only to wake up two decades later in a mosh pit at a Metallica concert.
Clothes lie like deflated bodies, sprawled near his closet as though they’d crawled out of it.
If Shakespeare’s right that all the world’s a stage, then Elle is the leading lady and I am the stagehand who maneuvers the levers for the trapdoors and curtain, a master of smoke and mirrors who ensures each act runs so seamlessly that no one even notices me.
“Do you ever feel like you’re in the wrong story?”… “No,” he says, finally. “But,” his gaze shifts to me, his eyes taking in my cuts and bruises, the hollow thing I’ve become, “why don’t you just write a better one?”
My Review:
I am woefully years behind in my TBR pile and innocently pulled out this little gem to peruse before making my way to the author’s newest release in this series. I had no idea what I was in for but was soon kicking myself for my tardiness and sloth.
I was instantly consumed by Ms. Morrissey’s evocative prose as the first paragraph sucked me into a dark, itchy, and enthralling vortex of a troubled and crumbling community. Her characters were complicated, compelling, and multi-faceted. Each new person introduced brought a unique type of nightmare as they all seemed to be teetering between a train wreck and a dumpster fire. And I couldn’t get enough. Luckily for me, the second and third books are already locked and loaded on my beloved Kindle. The Widowmaker is currently beckoning.
Hannah Morrissey is the author of the Black Harbor suspense series which includes Hello, Transcriber, The Widowmaker, and When I’m Dead. A three-decade survivor of Wisconsin winters, Hannah enjoys putting her characters (and readers) in bone-chilling atmospheres that permeate beyond the page. Naturally, her books have carved out their own sub-genre of “Midwestern Noir.”
Between roles of bookseller and copywriter, Hannah was inspired to write her debut novel while transcribing reports for her local police department. Far from home in a grim, crime-ridden city, it was her job to sit alone in the dead of night, listen, and type as detectives divulged the city’s darkest secrets. There, she realized that every case was a story, and every story started with the same two words: “Hello, Transcriber.”
Hannah graduated from the University of Wisconsin – Madison where she majored in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. She grew up in a small northern town and now lives near Milwaukee with her husband, three pugs, and a TBR pile that never seems to get any smaller.