Tag:

Police Procedural

Review

Shadowheart

by Jeff Ayers

Gardiner shakes up the serial-killer genre with her latest thriller. FBI profiler Caitlin Hendrix visits serial killer Efrem Judah Goode in prison. He shows her detailed drawings of the women he has killed, but none of them are the victims he’s incarcerated for killing. He claims innocence for those women’s murders but is not innocent of being a murderer. There is a copycat called the Broken Heart Killer, and somehow Goode and this UNSUB are connected. Caitlin dives into the case and will once again put her career and life on the line for justice, while bringing closure to the families of the women Goode killed. What she uncovers will surprise even the most jaded reader. Gardiner has a gift for tackling gruesome and uncomfortable topics and giving the prose a literary spin. While other authors might wallow in the ugly, Gardiner makes it beautiful. Fans of true crime and the television show Criminal Minds should make Gardiner mandatory reading.

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Review

Daughter of Ashes

by Brian Kenney

This is the final book in Tuti’s stunning and disturbing trilogy starring police detective Teresa Battaglia and set in the Dolomite mountains of northern Italy. Teresa has always been an extraordinary character, a woman who fought her way up the police ladder—while suffering the ridicule of her male peers—and at the same time found herself caught in an abusive marriage that nearly killed her. Now in her early sixties, she has slowly acknowledged that she has Alzheimer’s, and in this book we see it beginning to dominate her life. But just as she is about to retire, Teresa is brought back to work on a case featuring Giacomo Mainardi, a serial killer she confronted 27 years ago, whose mind she has come to understand and whose soul she has come to respect. While very much the tale of a serial killer, this final volume finds Teresa finally accepting the love and support of her colleagues, putting aside the “thick and steely…armor she wore every day,” and acknowledging that she has paved “the way for all the other women who would follow, and for anybody—regardless of their sex—who might be vulnerable to being victimized by people in position of power.” Best to read this brilliant series in order, beginning with Flowers over the Inferno.

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Review

The Bitter Past

by Henrietta Thornton

The high desert of eastern Nevada is Borgos’s setting for this series debut, and it opens with the most violent death Sheriff Porter Beck has seen. A retired FBI agent, Ralph Atterbury, looks to have been tortured for hours, his skin removed in strips and his nipples blowtorched. It can’t be a routine break-in, but what could the man have done that would inspire such rage? Flashing back to supposedly a more apple-pie time, Nevada in the Cold War, we meet Freddie Meyer, a young man who’s humble enough to go steady with Kitty Ellison, a bookish girl who “wasn’t the most striking” of her friends. In due course, Kitty’s physicist father helps Freddie get a job—he’s just so gosh-darn grateful!—at the nearby atomic testing site’s top-secret project. Readers are let in on the audacious, almost unbelievable plan that unfolds, one that Beck slowly uncovers as he seeks the identities of Atterbury’s killer and a Russian spy who he believes worked at the testing site all those years ago. Beck has the nice-guy relentlessness that readers love in an investigator. His love interest, present-day FBI agent Sana Locke, adds wiles and beauty, and the Cold War storyline is gripping. I can’t wait for the next from Borgos.

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Review

Malibu Burning

by Henrietta Thornton

You’ll find it hard not to root for both sides in two-time Edgar winner Goldberg’s latest, which pits arson investigators against a Robin Hood-like ex-con who sets a wildfire to consume what his enemies hold most dear: their possessions. The investigators are Walter Sharpe, a veteran of California fires who’s nicknamed Sharpei for his don’t-care physique and his newbie partner, Andrew Walker, who’s eight-months-pregnant wife begged him to take this job so that he will get home for dinner every night. But things get, ahem, hotter than the duo plans when con-man Danny Cole is released from his time in prison, which he spent as a firefighter, with years of nothing but planning under his belt. While this is a series debut, the fire depicted is the same one that featured in the author’s Lost Hills; fans of that book should know that this one looks at the inferno from a different perspective and involves a different crime story. Both fans and newcomers to Goldberg’s work will enjoy the fast-moving, at times terrifying, tale and its close look at firefighting and arson-investigation techniques. A bonus is the companion buddy story featuring likable new police-procedural partners and their unusual focus

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Review

Blood Betrayal

by Henrietta Thornton

Khan’s latest features extremes: fast moments of violence and the long years of condemnation and recriminations that follow, and found families—good and evil—in contrast with those we’re born into. Blackwater Falls, CO, Community Response Officer Inaya Rahman is facing a ghost from her Chicago PD past: John Broda, an officer who badly beat her. Now he wants a favor. Broda’s son, another officer, is accused of shooting an innocent young man, and Broda knows that Inaya is both smart and caring enough to find out the truth. In return, he’ll give her a recording she’s long wanted of another officer implicating himself in a racist crime. It’s not Rahman’s case, and she clashes with her boss, Qas Seif. Inaya and Qas’s feelings for each other, and the family ties that are a highlight here, only complicate matters. Further difficulties are added by a parallel crime, this time one Inaya is officially working on: a white officer who’s near retirement shoots a young Black man, and the community is seething. Khan excels in creating multifaceted characters whose engrossing stories bring up social questions to which there are no easy answers. As in the best crime fiction, the solution here is both satisfying and unexpected.

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Review

One Last Kill

by Jeff Ayers

A newspaper retrospective of an unsolved killing spree brings back more than memories in Dugoni’s latest thriller. The Route 99 serial killer seemed to stop almost three decades ago, but why? The upcoming article reflecting on the murders has Tracy Crosswhite investigating the cold case with Johnny Nolasco, her superior, whom she does not get along with. He ran the original task force, and failing to deliver a suspect still haunts him. The two must overcome their differences to see if they can find justice and bring closure to the victims’ families. The clues lead to the horrific possibility that renewed exposure will cause the killer to strike again. Though this is the 10th Tracy Crosswhite, newcomers will savor the story, while Dugoni fans will love how he ties up several storylines from earlier novels. Few authors deliver consistently stellar crime fiction, and Dugoni is one of those writers. Michael Connelly fans should have this series on their reading pile.

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Review

Urgent Matters

by Henrietta Thornton

“The only way to survive a whirlpool is to let yourself be dragged along by it,” realizes Evelyn, the confused daughter of an accused murderer. The murderer, Hugo Lamadrid, has been missing since a Buenos Aires train crash killed and maimed scores of passengers. Readers know that Hugo escaped the wreckage, where bodies are “piled up, jumbled together, crushed against the walls of the carriage, spilling out the window, dislocated, broken, busted.” But the police don’t know and have just been to his house about the murder. What the authorities do know is that Evelyn and her mother, Marta, suddenly and mysteriously got the urge to leave town after the police’s visit, and now the national media is fixed on the shrine they’ve set up at the home of Marta’s sister that begs the wounds “ofourlordjesuschrist” to help find poor, hapless Hugo alive on the train. A whirlpool indeed, in a book whose baroque abundance of language, strange observations, and even stranger ending are memorable and striking. For those who loved Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic.

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Review

Hollow Beasts

by Henrietta Thornton

This propulsive series debut from the author of The Dirty Girls Social Clubsees the filthy, heavily armed, and none-too-bright Zebulon Boys arrive in rural New Mexico to take on a mix of Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and interracial locals, all of whom the would-be terrorists see as Mexicans who have to go. The leader, General Zeb, gets his hateful fans from around the country to come to his camp. They keep kidnapped “Mexican” women in a hole in the ground and take them out to be hunted. They’re also planning to bomb local sites to stop the Reconquista, the reclaiming of culture and land by those who lived in the area when it was part of Mexico.

The Zebulon Boys meet their match in Jodi Luna, a former poetry professor who’s returned to her roots in the area, taking over her retiring uncle’s job as the local, and sole, game warden. It’s a dangerous job—the most perilous in U.S. law enforcement, we learn. But Jodi is ready, using her intelligence, humor, and compassion to take on the men—one of whom starts to stalk her—and protect her daughter, her growing circle of friends, and two admirers.

Game warden is an unusual and interesting take on a police-procedural set up, and Valdés can surely tell a story, making this a winner all round.

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Review

Where the Dead Sleep

by Brian Kenney

In this second in the series, Assistant Sheriff Ben Packard is juggling two major incidents. One is the death of his mentor, Sheriff Stan Shaw, which raises the question of whether Ben should run to replace Shaw as Sheriff of Minnesota’s Sandy Lake County, several hours north of the Twin Cities and a popular vacation spot. For someone who’s lived in the county for only a year or so, Ben’s got plenty of supporters, but he isn’t sure he’s ready to give up being a detective. Plus, he’s anxious about how being gay is going to play out at the polls. The other incident is the death of Bill Sanderson, shot multiple times in his bed. Nobody loved Bill—except maybe his ex-wife, who’s the sister of his new widow—but nobody seemed to hate Bill enough to actually kill him. Not his business partner, not his gambling buddies, not his spouse. To solve Bill’s death, Ben goes even deeper into the Sandy Lake community than ever before, peeling off the many dark and gritty layers, deciphering the complex family relations, and at one point putting his own life at risk. This novel works fine as a stand-alone, but readers of the first in the series, And There He Kept Her, will appreciate seeing Ben’s development and piecing together the disquieting world of Sandy Lake.

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Review

What Remains

by Henrietta Thornton

A particular type of horror needs nothing supernatural: It’s when a mundane task suddenly requires every ounce of will and wits to survive. Police officer Elise Sutton is shopping for towels—her kids have been hinting that the threadbare affairs they’ve been using are not the world’s only towels, but who has the time?—when her training kicks into gear: there’s a shooter in the store. The scene that unfolds is a highlight of the book, though far from the only tense moment, and a meticulous portrait of human nature under pressure. Elise gets the gunman in her sight as he takes aim at a tall man who then escapes; the gunman is killed by Elise and the clothing racks come alive with shoppers who were hiding, terrified. Elise must now deal with her own trauma, having killed a man, and with the doubt that plagues her: did she need to kill him? Just as readers settle in for a tale about survivor’s guilt and PTSD, the story takes a turn: the tall man shows up, way too grateful for being saved, and by the time Elise realizes that he’s acting oddly, he’s become her obsessed stalker. Alternating with this inward-focused tale of one woman’s turmoil and peril is the saga of a burned body that’s found in the Connecticut woods, in an oven used by hunters. Finding out how these stories are related, and whether Elise’s marriage and career can survive the terror she faces, makes the pages turn quickly. Ideal for those who enjoyed Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love, another tale of obsession.

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