The Midwest Book Review
by Diane Donovan, Sr. Reviewer
Under Richard G. Opper’s hand, each character’s feelings of success and failure, their nightmares and ambitions, and the different ways they reconcile their pasts and presents come to satisfying life.
As equally powerful as the fine character development is the attention to details that successfully entwine to create a surprising bigger picture than solving crime alone.
These elements contribute an excellent tension and overall atmosphere to a San Diego-based story that builds not just individual perspectives, but communities that operate both above-ground and underground.
The result is a crime story especially recommended for readers seeking memorable female leads whose lives and abilities equal their male counterparts, atmospheric settings firmly centered in a sense of place, and purposes that develop not just from monetary ambitions, but from the heart.
Readers’ Favorite
by Maria Victoria Beltran
“5 Star Rating”
Richard Opper’s The Body in the Barrel is a captivating and unusual murder mystery story narrated from a first-person perspective. The author takes us on a tour of the seedy underworld of 1970s San Diego with his descriptive literary style. With highly interesting and believable characters, the story comprises a series of twists and turns that are more vivid because they are revealed from the points of view of the characters involved. In this engrossing murder mystery, we find ourselves completely embroiled in dangerous and difficult situations with Mona and Gary after the discovery of the body. This book is a must-read, especially for fans of murder mystery stories. Highly recommended
The San Diego Union Tribune
by Seth Combs
Opper deftly creates a sense of place that, while the city has certainly changed, is still recognizable to readers of all ages.
…he based Mona and Gary on people he knew in order to create a novel that, while thrilling, was, as he puts it, “heavy on emotion,” a “hard-edged mystery with heart,” as one of the blurbs on the back book cover attests.
The East County Magazine
by Pennell Paugh
The Body in the Barrel is a compelling crime novel set in 1973 in San Diego…The investigation connects the kidnapping of a single-mother’s child ten years earlier to current day crimes. As the story unfolds, Opper reports events through the close point of view of the involved characters, including the kidnapper. A romance blossoms between a Harbor cop and the single-mother whose 3-year-old daughter was kidnapped in the 1960s and never found… I found the author’s approach to telling this story is unique and highly engaging. It was a fun read all the way through..