“Justice for Emerson” by Karen E. Osborne is a multi-layered murder mystery that will keep readers on the edge of their seats until the very last page. Aria Wright, the head of a nonprofit organization that works with the unhoused, finds the body of Emerson, one of her volunteers. Unfortunately, she also sees the masked killer, who threatens her to keep her mouth shut or else she’s dead. Her family, too.

But why? What could Aria possibly know?

The answer lies in Emerson’s past, what happened when he was a soldier in Vietnam in the late sixties. Is there a connection between the murder of his best friend at a bar in Vietnam and his own murder decades later?

This book was not only a good whodunit, but it also introduced several themes that make the reader think, such as love after bereavement, addiction, homelessness, historical racism in the military, importance of family, and forgiveness. Many thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for an ARC of this book. My opinion is my own.

I'm so glad I was able to read this and get into this whodunnit mystery, it had that element that I enjoyed from the genre and was hooked from start to finish and on the edge of my seat. The plot was everything that I was hoping for and thought the characters were everything that I was looking for. Karen E. Osborne has a strong writing style and the characters were so well written and I cared about what was going on.