Hazel Greenlee had come to Black Harbor two years earlier when her husband, Tommy, had gotten the job as the aquatic ecologist for the lake. An aspiring novelist, Hazel jumps at the chance to leave her mundane job at the community college bookstore and take a position with the Black Harbor Police Department as a police transcriber. She believes she’ll be able to absorb the atmosphere, feel, and knowledge of the job and bring it to her writing. “Write what you know,” she’d always heard.

When her next-door neighbor shows up at the police department one night and confesses to her that he’s hidden the body of a young boy who’s died from an overdose in an apartments’ dumpster, she is sucked into the very heart of the case.  Hazel, dissatisfied with the prison her marriage has devolved into and intrigued by the handsome lead detective, offers to help with his investigation.

Detective Nikolai Kole, a 16-year-veteran of the force, is a man with secrets and a checkered path in the department, a bad boy, and Hazel begins to have feelings for him. As the case progresses and more deaths occur, which seem to implicate Kole, she begins to doubt him and herself. Hazel wonders if she can trust him, or anyone at all in Black Harbor, for that matter.

HELLO, TRANSCRIBER by Hannah Morrissey was definitely a page-turner of a thriller! The story is set in a rapidly deteriorating lakeside town that has attracted an unhealthy amount of crime and its accompanying losers to its shores. With its creepy, wooded running trails, slum apartments, scuzzy motels, and the abandoned Forge Bridge, renowned as the site for numerous suicide jumps into the icy waters below, the author has created a cold, dark, forbidding place where fear and distrust are easy to imagine.

Hazel operates in darkness for the most part as well. She is the night shift transcriber, living her life on the opposite side of the clock from most of the community. This altered schedule isolates her and creates an artificial world populated by the police and other 3rd shift workers, drug addicts, and poverty-stricken where things aren’t quite what they seem, and the rules are different.

Her husband has “rules,” too, that made me cringe with unease. It almost led me to hope she would ditch this guy and go ahead and get involved with sexy Detective Kole. But as Hazel says a couple of times during the book that she is “broken,” this made me feel uncertain about her narrative, and I wondered if, perhaps, she was the unreliable one in this tale.

The plot is wonderfully twisty with suspects coming and going, and I ended up suspecting everyone at one point or another. But the buildup led to an exciting, heart-pounding resolution that surprised me while remaining both plausible and understandable. It felt right, and I didn’t feel like I’d been had; the hints were there for me to see.

Hazel’s story was exciting not only for the mystery but because of the relationships that evolve. There are some scary and sexy moments within the course of the investigation. I recommend HELLO, TRANSCRIBER to readers of mystery-thrillers that feature young, perhaps a bit naïve heroines and those that enjoy romantic suspense.