Review: Grievous Bodily Harm: A Toni Day Mystery by Jane Bennett Munro

Book: Grievous Bodily Harm: A Toni Day Mystery

Author: Jane Bennett Munro

Published Date: June 22nd, 2013

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Genre: Mystery

Series: Book 3 in Toni Day Mystery series

Book Link: Goodreads

Purchase Links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble

Synopsis:

When Marcus Manning is hired to help ease Perrine Memorial Hospital's transition from privately owned hospital to part of a behemoth system that covers most of the Pacific Northwest,he immediately stirs up trouble.He begins lying, bad-mouthing and blackmailing & even threatening the hospital staff and before he can really get going, pathologist Toni Day blows the whistle.

While the hospital considers firing him,someone else comes up with a more permanent solution-cyanide. Now Toni is the number one suspect and she must clear her name and find the real killer.

Disclaimer: I received this book from the author in exchange for my honest review.

Review:

This book is set two years after Too Much Blood. Not much has changed in Toni's personal life but things are changing at the hospital where she has been a pathologist for many years. Marcus Manning is one character that I wanted to take a shotgun to,and quickly. Usually I don't have that vehement of a statement about characters but he was the biggest book related asshole that I had "met" in awhile.

He is the type of character who abuses his power to the point of Toni being the recipient of a serious bodily injury that eventually requires surgery.He scares her staff by blackmailing them and attempting to extort sexual favors from him. All the while hiding the fact that he is abusing his wife on a daily basis. I wanted to reach through the book and strangle him until he turned limp beneath my hands.

Someone else had the same idea as Marcus is killed in plain sight of many people at a hospital picnic. No one knows who did it. Was it the wife? Was it the wife's best friend whom Marcus had bragged about sleeping with? Or was it Toni,fed up with the physical & emotional damage that Marcus was inflicting upon her?

I really enjoyed this book. Like Too Much Blood,I found Toni to be a badass and she was the type of woman who took no crap from anyone. Even from someone who had the ability to get her fired.In Too Much Blood,one of my only criticisms was that the secondary characters weren't as well developed as I would have liked,particularly Hal, Toni's husband of many years.

However,the author seemed to take these comments to heart and I noticed a definite increase in character development this time around. I got a much better picture of Hal as well as Toni's stepdaughter & her husband Pete. Lets not forget the friends as well. They played a much more important role this time around.I was thrilled to see such commitment to better character development.

The majority of the book seemed to focus on the crap that Marcus was attempting to throw at the hospital before his untimely death. That would be my only complaint this time around.It's not enough to change my rating though. 

This book was a throughly enjoyable book that kept me guessing throughout the entire thing. I actually enjoyed this book MORE than Too Much Blood and for that reason,this book gets a full 5 stars from me. I cannot wait to see what the author writes next.