6 DAYS, A Dee Rommel Mystery

Dee Rommel crosses the Boston Marathon finish line on her running blade. The image sets the scene. Dee isn’t defined by the prosthetic she wears. She’s annoyed she couldn’t break four hours. That’s the difference between texture and topic. Selbo picks texture.

The plot splits two ways. A ransomware crew hits New England blood banks. Hospitals postpone surgeries. Selbo skips the movie hacking. The bigger case pulls Dee to a private island off Downeast Maine. A reclusive heiress, Freya Cummings, is being shaken down over a child she gave up decades ago. Old money, a walled cemetery, a kid who’d rather learn Python than inherit anything. It’s obvious that Selbo did her research on blood supply and on how families bury scandals.

The island is the book’s best asset. Caretaker Otto might be more than a caretaker. Danny Junior’s bar draws townies who resent the summer people. Tutor Syd rattles off half a dozen languages and lands between comic relief and menace. These aren’t sketches. Syd alone could carry a subplot.

Scale is where the book strains. The cast keeps expanding: a dying mentor, his meddling cousin, an ex-cop boyfriend on the cyber squad, a botanist love interest, a half-sister from California. Selbo cuts between them in short scenes. Depth loses to coverage. A few late reveals, including a body in the family plot and a gun in the drawing room, land light. There’s too much ground to cover first.

Voice holds the book together. Dee narrates in short, wired sentences. She clocks who’s performing and who isn’t. She reads Wallace Walsh’s chivalry toward Freya as manipulation, then as real, and never picks. That refusal to flatten people into good guys and victims is the book’s strength. Even Freya, who could have been a wounded-heiress cliché, stays evasive and cold. On purpose.

The ending doesn’t tie a bow on anything. Freya gets her daughter back but not her past. Dee goes home to a chaotic found-family dinner and a half-formed romance she’s still not sure about. Nothing about that dishonesty-versus-money question she’s been chewing on gets a clean answer. It gets set down.

This is a book about what families do to protect money, and what that costs the people inside them. Dee narrates and is too busy doing her job to editorialize. Fans of the series get what they came for. New readers may miss the shorthand from earlier books, but overall this is still an enjoyable read.