BOOK REVIEW: Holly by Stephen King

Holly is another entry by Stephen King into the universe in which the Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, Finders Keepers, End of Watch) was set, although this time Holly Gibney is the primary character. Gibney is also featured  in The Outsider  and one of the four novellas that make up the 2020 collection If It Bleeds.  Even though I am not a fan of the horror genre or supernatural stories in general, I now consider myself a fan of King’s. In the last few years I have read and reviewed Fairy Tale (2023), Billy Summers (2022) and The Institute (2020) I appreciate what an amazing storyteller he is. Even so, I generally restrict myself to his non-supernatural fare, which I enjoy tremendously, and Holly is no exception.

The Bill Hodges trilogy were some of the first books by King that I read, primarily because they are in the mystery/detective/thriller genre. They feature Bill Hodges as a former cop who opens his own private detective agency (called Finders Keepers) and features Holly as his shy but capable assistant who becomes his partner as well as Jerome Robinson, a computer savvy Black teenager who does odd jobs for Bill.  Although Bill was the main character of the series, my favorites were always Jerome and Holly and I hoped that King would return to them in future work, which he has done with the publication of Holly.

Holly is the main character in Holly, which is set in July 2021 smack dab in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump era. Holly is mourning the death of her mom (due to COVID after refusing to get vaccinated) when she gets a call at the detective agency from a mother panicked about the disappearance of her adult daughter, Bonnie Dahl, who worked at the library of the local small college in town. Holly, who King himself has described as “obsessive compulsive with a huge inferiority complex,” is very careful about getting COVID and a fair amount of her internal monologue is about masking and her interactions with folks around her and their thoughts about COVID and Trump. This makes Holly a “political book” in the sense that  King (through Holly as his avatar) makes his thoughts about his views on these topics very clear. (Since I share these views I didn't find this aspect distracting or problematic.)

Some reviewers of  Holly question King’s choice to begin a detective mystery novel by revealing that the culprits are a pair of murderous, cannibalistic, septuagenarian professors, Rodney and Ellen Harris, who select their victims from the itinerant human flotsam available to them in the wake of a small town dominated by a prestigious college. But the detective story where the reader knows who did it from the beginning and the suspense is sourced in how and when (not really whether) the protagonist will figure it out (and stop the criminal before they crime again) is a tried and true trope of the genre. (Val McDermid is a Master at this form.) Here, I think this story structure works quite well, and especially when the reader gets first-person perspective from more than one character who is caught in the devilish flytrap of the Professors Harris.

An interesting feature of Holly is that it features not one but two subplots about young writers who are both experiencing their first successful encounters with the publishing industry. King often writes about writers in his books and his enthusiasm for this aspect of the story was palpable.

A surprising feature of Holly is that it features absolutely no supernatural phenomena. The Harrises have a reason for why they are periodically enticing, trapping, and culling people and it is because they believe that eating the human flesh of people significantly younger than they are will improve their health. For a significant fraction of the book King makes it appear as if they may be right, since they do appear to be experiencing  some relief, perhaps supernatural in nature, from their multiple health ailments not unfamiliar to people as old as the Harrises (mind-numbingly painful sciatica for her, and the numbing of the mind of dementia for him). But in the end King (again via his avatar Holly) points out that the bad guys’ evil, false beliefs are trumped [sic] by science: they were experiencing the placebo effect, completely dismantling any imagined rationale they could have posited to justify their murderous actions of killing and eating their neighbors. To me it is clear that King is trying to demonstrate that fact-based reality can be used to explain that people who do awful things (like deny the reality of COVID and the effectiveness of vaccines or vote for Trump or kill and eat fellow humans) are really doing it because they are awful people, despite what they tell themselves the reasons for doing these things are.

Title: Holly
Author: Stephen King.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 464 pages.
Publisher: Scribner.
Date Published: September 5, 2023.
Date Read: December 10, 2023.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: All The Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby

All The Sinners Bleed is the third Southern noir book by S.A. Cosby that I have read, after Blacktop Wasteland (2020) and Razorblade Tears (2021). I was very happy to be alerted by the Libby app that this book was available for a 1-week loan; it took me only four days to finish reading it—All The Sinners Bleed was almost impossible to put down once started.

Like the two previous books by Cosby that I have read, All The Sinners Bleed is set in the rural South. This time the protagonist is Titus Crown, who has recently surprised himself—and Charon County in rural Virginia where he was born and raised—to become the first Black man elected Sheriff.

The book begins with a bang (literally!) on the first anniversary of Titus’ election with a shooting (at Jefferson Davis HIgh School!) where a mentally troubled Black man named Lattrell Macdonald shoots and kills a well-regarded science teacher Mr. Spearman and is then himself shot by the (white) members of the sheriff’s department after brandishing a rifle while muttering incoherently about Mr. Spearman’s phone. When Titus investigates what reasons Latrell could possibly have to kill Mr. Spearman he discovers a horrifying secret which roils the entire small town of Charon.

It turns out that Mr. Spearman was a murderous pedophile, who preyed upon young Black children, assisted by Latrell to do so, while wearing masks and costumes. Even the casual description of Mr. Spearman’s acts are nauseating and Titus takes it upon himself to spare his deputies from seeing the worst stuff himself once they get a search warrant to search Spearman’s house. (The people who do watch the videotapes and view the pictures often find themselves vomiting afterwards and questioning their religious faith.) However, it soon becomes clear that there's a third man who is either white or a very light-skinned Black guy who was also involved in the heinous acts that were committed and this person, who Titus calls “The Last Wolf”  is still on the loose.

Cosby does an excellent job of depicting the internal dialogue and philosophical contradictions that Titus has as a black man serving in a public-facing law enforcement role. Many in the community want to see the incidents only in black and white: i.e., “crazy black guy killed beloved white teacher,” or “brave white cop killed armed black guy,” but Titus takes a more nuanced view because he has a job to do: catch this m****f*****. Cosby shows how the procedures and rules the sheriff's office needs to follow don’t allow him to be as forthcoming to the public in as timely a fashion as he (or they) would like. Titus is laser focused on solving the crime and capturing the remaining at-large sicko who has been raping and torturing Black kids to death. But both the black and white concerned citizens of Charon are not happy with the way Titus is doing his job in light of the revelation that Charon County has a resident serial killer on the loose.

An important characteristic of detective novels is not only how interesting the protagonist is but also how well-drawn the supporting characters are done. In the case of All The Sinners Bleed, Titus is a fully realized main character. He lives with his elderly father and has a complicated relationship with him due to his father’s (in)actions after the death of Titus’s mom decades before. These events also complicated Titus’s relationship with his brother, who dealt with his grief by using drugs. Additionally, the reasons that Titus moved back to Charon County in the first place after leaving the FBI are slowly revealed (in intermittent flashbacks) with more details that cast him in a less heroic and more realistic fashion.

Of course, since this is a genre novel, we end up with a lot more violence and dead bodies than the ones from the school shooting scene that began the book. It’s clear that the perpetrator of these atrocities is becoming more unhinged as Titus’s investigation gets closer and closer to revealing who The Last Wolf is. 

In the end, Titus (and the reader) discover who the serial killer is and stops his crime spree, but not until after a number of more horrific acts get perpetrated. Overall, I enjoyed spending time in the company of Titus, but events towards the end of the book and the fact that Cosby appears to not feel the need to build multiple mystery stories around the same character/detective, mean that it is unlikely that he’ll appear in another Cosby southern noir book. Even if that is the case, I definitely hope that we get more books from Cosby!

Title: All The Sinners Bleed.
Author: S.A. Cosby.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 352 pages.
Publisher: Scribner.
Date Published: November 1, 2022.
Date Read: June 27, 2023.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A (4.0/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Exiles (Aaron Falk, #3) by Jane Harper

Exiles is the third (and final?) book in the police procedural series set in rural Australia featuring federal tax investigator Aaron Falk written by Jane Harper. The other books in the Falk series are The Dry (2016) and Force of Nature (2017). Harper is well-known for her suspenseful, lyrical mystery novels and Exiles (2023) is another example of this.

This time the main mystery is the disappearance of a 39-year-old new mother from a food and wine festival being held in a small rural (fictional) town named Marralee in the Australian wine country in Victoria. The missing woman is Kim Gillespie, the ex-wife of Charlie Raco, who is the brother of Aaron’s friend Greg Raco, another Australian cop who we were introduced to in Force of Nature. Aaron had been named godfather to Greg and Rita’s newborn kid Henry and was in town for the christening the very day Kim disappeared. He was at the Raco home when Kim called Zara, the 17-year-old daughter she had with Charlie to discuss how they would meet up at the Maralee festival.

All this information is provided in the prologue. When the story begins it's one year later and Aaron is driving to Marralee again to finally participate in the long-delayed christening of his godson, Henry Raco. We learn how the family members have been affected by Kim’s disappearance, and we get introduced to Kim’s husband, Rohan and his and Kim’s daughter. We also learn that Kim’s disappearance is not the only violent crime that the small town of Marralee has known. About five years ago there was a hit-and-run very near the site of the Festival, again during opening weekend (which is when Kim disappeared) that resulted in the death of Dean Tozer, the husband of Gemma Tozer and father of Joel. Joel and Kara are now teenage friends, bonded together through the loss of their parents.

One key aspect of Harper’s mysteries that makes them so compelling is that she uses her books to comment on and depict contemporary Australian life and the social problems that are lying below the surface. For example, in Exiles drinking alcohol by teenagers and the dangerous behaviors this can facilitate animates multiple important plot points. Ultimately, I would say that Exiles is about solitude, and the consequences of cutting oneself off (or being cut off by the actions of others) from the people around you that know you the best. (The book makes clear that in some cases this could be your family or your chosen family and doesn’t communicate any value judgments on the difference between them.)

Another key aspect of Harper’s mysteries, at least the ones that I have read that feature Aaron Falk, have been the internal dialogue of the protagonist. I wasn’t really that impressed with, or frankly very interested in, Falk’s inner life or personality in the first two books, The Dry and Forces of Nature, but in Exiles I really enjoyed getting to know him better. I’m not exactly sure why that is, but it could be that in addition to the career wanderlust that is a recurring theme in all three books, in Exiles he is also pursuing a romantic relationship. As a gay man reading about a straight male character (written by a presumably straight woman) falling in love, I was surprised at how much I was invested in the resolution of this storyline.

Overall, Exiles is (by far!) the best of the Aaron Falk books written by Jane Harper. It is billed as the last in a trilogy of books but I hope that is not the case, I would love to spend more time in rural Australia with Falk as he solves crimes. But even if Harper doesn’t write more books featuring Falk I am confident she will write more compelling mysteries set in rural Australia in the future.

Title: Exiles (Aaron Falk, #3).
Author: Jane Harper.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 353 pages.
Publisher: Orbit Books.
Date Published: May 26, 2022.
Date Read: May 22, 2023.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★½☆  (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: A Dying Fall (Ruth Galloway, #5) by Elly Griffiths

A Dying Fall is the fifth book in author Elly Griffiths' murder-mystery series starring Dr. Ruth Galloway, head of Forensic Archaeology at the University of Northern Norfolk, and DCI Harry Nelson, head of the major crimes squad of the Norfolk Police Department. These books are known as the Ruth Galloway mysteries and they are generally cold case murders (Ruth is an archaeologist after all) with a smidgen of romance (the relationship between Ruth and Harry is complicated--they hooked up once and the married police detective is the unacknowledged father of unmarried Ruth's daughter named Kate.)

I read and enjoyed the first four books in the Ruth Galloway series in quick succession (The Crossing Places, The Janus Stone ,The House at Sea's End, A Room Full of Bones) but put the series on a backburner when supernatural elements became a bit too central to the story for my taste in Book 4. (Longtime readers will know I am not a fan of supernatural elements, especially in murder-mysteries, because of the way it revises the implicit contract between author and reader in a whodunnit mystery. (If reality is subject to supernatural revision then how can the reader have a chance of solving the mystery?)

Anyway, the primary appeal of the Galloway books has always been the no-nonsense personalities of Ruth and Nelson, who the reader generally gets first-person perspectives on in every book. The secondary appeal are the rotating cast of secondary characters, primarily Cathbad, the sensitive and strange Druid who always seems to be in the right place at the right time, Ruth’s obnoxious department chair Phil Trent, various police officers who work with Nelson (Judy Johnson, Dave Clough, Tanya Fuller, and his boss Gerry Whitcliffe).

In  A Dying Fall an old schoolmate of Ruth’s from university named Dan Golding is killed by setting his house on fire with all the exits locked and blocked, soon after he made what he thought could be a blockbuster archaeological discover in the Lancashire area near where Nelson grew up and used to serve in the Blackpool police department when he was much younger. Ruth decides to go north to Blackpool with her young daughter Kate and Cathbad as guest babysitter after she is invited by Dan’s department chair to serve as an expert evaluator of his potential discovery. Of course, coincidentally Nelson and his wife Michelle decide to take a vacation to his hometown around the same time to go on a long-delayed visit to see Nelson’s mum.

With Nelson and Ruth in the same area when more bodies start appearing there are multiple opportunities for awkward run-ins and suspicious behavior as they both try to solve their respective mysteries. Tensions run even higher when just as their separate investigations cross paths, Kate goes missing, after being left in the care of Cathbad while Ruth was sleuthing.

Overall, this is one of the better entries in the series, which is becoming even more familiar and likeable as I read more of the books. The supernatural elements were kept to a minimum, and primarily involved Cathbad, who is so weird and wacky it’s hard to dislike. I’m pretty sure I won’t wait another 18 months to read the next book, The Outcast Dead!

Title: A Dying Fall.
Author: Elly Griffiths.
Paperback: 400 pages.
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Date Published: March 5, 2013.
Date Read: April 23, 2023.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★½☆  (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A-.

BOOK REVIEW: Nighthawking (DS Adam Tyler, #2) by Russ Thomas

Nighthawking is the second book in the Detective Sergeant Adam Tyler series written by Russ Thomas. These British police procedurals are set in South Yorkshire, where the openly gay protagonist DS Tyler is a member of the Cold Case Review Unit (CCRU) of the Sheffield Police.

Nighthawking is set about a year after the events that transpired at the end of Firewatching. DS Tyler is working with (formerly PC) now DC Mina Rabbani on a cold case involving the disappearance of a young boy when the body of an unknown young Asian woman with ancient Roman gold coins over her eyes is discovered on the grounds of the Sheffield Botanical Gardens by a nighthawker, someone who uses metal detectors to seek out buried and hidden items of value on public lands.

DS Tyler is busy with and distracted by his obsessive investigation into a personally significant cold case: his own police detective father's suspicious death two decades ago when Tyler was a teenager. It thus falls to Mina to try and solve a case which is much more complicated than it first appears.

As with the first book in the series, the primary appeal of the story is seeing first hand how Tyler and Mina, both outsiders in the police force due to race, gender and sexual orientation, go about their jobs as police officers trying to solve crimes. In Nighthawking, there's less depiction of Tyler’s gayness but there’s more depiction of Mina’s intelligence and I’d say that’s a net positive. That being said, it’s a lot rarer to have an openly gay police detective than it is to have a smart female police detective in these genre books so I hope that the author doesn't shy away from depicting his protagonist's sexuality in future books, just as one would expect it to show up as one aspect of a heterosexual character’s life.

Another similarity Nighthawking has with Firewatching is the complexity of the plot, along with a veiled depiction of events from the perspective of the perpetrator. In Firewatching there were curious blog posts describing the work of a serial arsonist as intertextual elements between chapters. In Nighthawking we get brief reports from nighthawkers summarizing the results of their forays and searches. Both times we eventually realize that these elements are providing clues about the identity of the perpetrator.

There are many plots in Nighthawking. Tyler finds a lead which may lead to more information about his father’s death, and he also ends up cracking the cold case of the disappearance of the young boy, mostly inadvertently, as Rabbani does most of the work to identify the dead girl and whoever killed her. Of course, other dead bodies and near-fatal incidents also appear in the book along the way before we get a surprising resolution to the book’s primary mystery. The final scene of the book is a stunner; it presents the reader with new information about Tyler’s father’s death that will surely reverberate in the next book in the series, Cold Reckoning.

Title: Nighthawking (DS Adam Tyler, #2).
Author: Russ Thomas.
Format: Hardcover.
Length: 384 pages.
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Date Published: February 23, 2021.
Date Read: December 21, 2022.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A-.

BOOK REVIEW: Firewatching (DS Adam Tyler, #1) by Russ Thomas

Firewatching is the first book in the Detective Sergeant Adam Tyler series written by Russ Thomas. This British police procedural is set in Sheffield (South Yorkshire) where the openly gay protagonist of the books is a member of the Cold Case Review Team. In the begining of Firewatching a body is discovered after a fire broke out during renovations of the country estate of dodgy financier Gerald Cartwright who had disappeared six years before. DS Tyler convinces his boss (and godmother!) DCI Diane Jordan to let him work the case even though it's now decidedly much more high profile than his typical cold case. When he does so, Tyler neglects to point out that he hooked up with Cartwright’s handsome 21-year-old son Oscar the night before the discovery of the body. Despite his own uncertain status on the force due to his sexual orientation and his policeman father’s suspicious death years before when he worked with DCI Jordan, DS Tyler nevertheless uses what pull he does have to get a fellow outsider, feisty Muslim Detective Constable Amina Rabbani seconded to him, and together they work with Tyler’s frenemy Detective Inspector John Doggett and the preternaturally lazy Detective Sergeant Guy Daley to try and discover how and why an unknown person sealed someone else inside the house and left them to die. 

Of course, as with most mystery novels, there’s more than just one puzzle to solve and in a small village almost everyone can (and probably should) be considered a suspect. In the case of Firewatching, the fire that led to the discovery of the body is just one of several recent suspicious fire events that seem to have clear connections to Gerald Cartwright. 

The strengths of Firewatching lie in the characterizations of the main characters. We get first person accounts from both DC Rabbani and DS Tyler (and often they are thinking about the other) which are both revealing and entertaining. Additionally, there are multiple subplots which are based around events that happened 20 and 40 years before, which demonstrates how the events and crimes of today are often sourced in the past. And then, of course, more bodies (and more fires) start to show up as the plot thickens and the mysteries deepen.

Eventually, DS Tyler does solve the main case of how the body got to be found in the Cartwright mansion as well as who's setting fires around Sheffield. Along the way he meets a handsome, very muscular firefighter who also happens to be Black, so in addition to the tension of “will they or won't they (have sex)” is the question of “is he or isn’t he a suspect?” As I have said before, the strength of a detective series is often in the supporting characters, and their relationship to the main character/protagonist. Here those relationships are intriguingly complex, and involve issues that are not often discussed in the British police procedural genre: homophobia/racism/xenophobia/sexism in policing, lingering effects of traumatic events from childhood, and work/life balance. If the two existing sequels, Nighthawking (2021) and Cold Reckoning (2022), are even half as well-written as Firewatching I look forward to reading them and hopefully many more after that!

Title: Firewatching (DS Adam Tyler, #1).
Author: Russ Thomas.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 365pages.
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's' Sons.
Date Published: February 25, 2020.
Date Read: December 19, 2022.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★ (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie, #3) by Kate Aktinson

When Will There Be Good News? is the third installment in the immensely popular  British crime detective series written by Kate Atkinson featuring former police detective Jackson Brodie. Atkinson is an interesting and unusual author; although mostly known for her literate novels with exquisite writing and evocative language, she has also dabbled in writing genre fiction, which often gets unfairly labeled as possessing uninspiring prose (although readers of S.A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears would beg to differ!) The Jackson Brodie books were adapted into a very popular British TV series called “Case Histories” which ran for two 3-episode series in 2010 and 2011. All of the Brodie books by Atkinson have tens of thousands of ratings on Goodreads with average scores bear 4.0 on a 5-point scale.

Atkinson's first two books featuring Jackson Brodie are Case Histories and One Good Turn. They are very different from each other and from most books in the British crime thriller genre that I am so fond of. They are both so good that I have been trying to extend the time between reading subsequent entries since there are only a total of five books in the series. The Brodie books most definitely need to be read in publication order as events in one book are referred to in another.

The most memorable aspect of the Jackson Brodie books is Jackson himself, of course. He’s a former Edinburgh police detective and Army veteran who in the beginning of the first book has started to do private investigator work. As with most excellent detective novels, he has a complicated past that led him to pursue this line of work. He left home and joined the military at a very young age after his beloved sister Niamh disappeared when he was about 16 and her naked body was found in a nearby river soon afterwards. Niamh’s murder was never solved and Brodie has had a soft spot for damsels in distress ever since.

Another aspect of the Jackson Brodie books that makes them so compelling is Atkinson’s inclusion of many bizarre (and often horrific) crimes, either depicted from the perspective of the perpetrator or survivor. In fact, although Jackson is the primary character in the books, he often does not appear in the story for vast swathes of time, as “secondary” characters are used to advance the plot and also get first-person perspectives. Atkinson’s books can have multiple chapters that depict interactions between two (or more) non-Brodie characters, sometimes depicting serene, domestic scenes or sometimes incredibly horrific crimes. Then one of the central puzzles of the books is to figure out how those events where Brodie was absent as well as the people involved will be connected to Brodie at some point. In the first three books, the majority of these characters have been women, often people who he becomes romantically entangled with, or would like to be. 

In When Will There Be Good News?, the main non-Brodie character is 16-year-old Reggie Chase who “could pass for 16” and is effectively an orphan due to a freak accident that killed her mother while on holiday with another one of her mom’s problematic paramours. When we met Reggie she’s acting as nanny/babysitter for Dr. Joanna Hunter’s newborn baby despite being a minor child herself. Almost half the book is spent with Reggie, which is a lot of fun, because Reggie is a great character! She has a slightly older brother named Billy who has a dodgy moral compass and is clearly a minor criminal of some kind. She’s quite smart but had decided to leave her expensive private school to go out on her own even before her mom died unexpectedly because. When Dr. Hunter and her baby disappear, Reggie takes care of Sadie, Dr. Hunter’s large German Shepherd, and the two become inseparable for much of the book. Eventually Reggie saves Brodie’s life and asks him to help find Dr. Hunter. 

The other non-Brodie character we spend significant time with is Detective Chief Inspector Louise Monroe, who also appeared in One Good Turn. After the events of that book we aren’t surprised that Louise and Jackson are married at the beginning of When Will There Be Good News? but we are surprised that they aren’t married to each other.

By the end of When Will There Be Good News?, all the mysteries are resolved and there are many surprising developments that will have significant life-changing impacts on all of the main characters in the book (Jackson Brodie, Louise Monroe, Reggie Chase, Joanna Hunter). I’m very excited to see what happens in the fourth Jackson Brodie book, Started Early, Took My Dog.

Title: When Will There Be Good News? (Jackson Brodie, #3).
Author: Kate Atkinson.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 388 pages.
Publisher: Little, Brown.
Date Published:  September 24, 2008.
Date Read: September 27, 2022.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.75/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Quieter Than Killing (DI Marnie Rome, #4) by Sarah Hilary

The fourth book in the DI Marnie Rome series written by Sarah Hilary is Quieter Than Killing. (I have enjoyed the others, Someone Else's Skin, No Other Darkness, and Tastes Like Fear,) This time the story is about a series of violent attacks of people who have previously been accused or convicted of violent or criminal behavior. DI Rome and her partner DS Noah Jake realize that they are looking for a vigilante, someone who has taken the law into their own hands (and decided to break the law in order to punish others they think deserve it).

As they try to find the vigilante, Rome and Jake are also faced with the kidnapping of the 10-year-old so of a jailhouse informant as well as the trashing of the house where Rome’s parents were murdered by her adopted brother, Stephen Keele, who has been moved to an adult prison now that he’s over 18.

There are multiple strengths in these Sarah Hilary mystery thrillers and many of these strengths appear in Quieter Than Killing.
First among these is the depiction of Marnie as a strong female protagonist, working in a predominantly male environment of a police department that solves major crimes in London. Another strong feature of these books is the inclusion of Noah as an openly gay, Black police officer who serves as her deputy. (There are multiple references to how good looking Noah is, as well as his boyfriend Dan, but this doesn’t mean that he’s not subject to both racism and homophobia while doing his job.) Hilary does an excellent job of fleshing out many of the characters in these books, especially in the ways she provides enough information to give the reader insight into their psyches, this includes the criminals and the police officers who try to catch them. One other compelling aspect of the Marnie Rome books is the backstory of Marnie and Noah, and as the books have progressed, there have been developments in how these characters have dealt with and adapted to changes.

I would definitely place these books in the genre of psychological thriller. In Quieter Than Killing, like in her other books, the author presents the crimes (and the criminals) in such a way that their psychologies are revealed and this has quite a memorable impact on the reader. I recommend this book and the others in the series (you don’t have to read them in sequence but why wouldn’t you?) to people who like the work of Jane Casey and Val McDermid, who are other British mystery authors with female protagonists in their books.

Title: Quieter Than Killing (DI Marnie Rome, #4).
Author: Sarah Hilary.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 432 pages.
Publisher: Headline.
Date Published: March 19, 2017.
Date Read: February 19, 2022.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: B+.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.

BOOK REVIEW: Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby

Razorblade Tears is the first book by this author that I have read; it is his first book after his wildly successful Blacktop Wasteland which won a bucketful of genre awards (Los Angeles Times, Anthony, Macavity, Barry ). The reason I started with Razorblade Tears instead is because it was on sale for $2.99 on Kindle and also because of the intriguing blurb describing the plot.

The first thing that strikes you as you read Razorblade Tears is the superior quality of the prose; Cosby is a master of metaphor and is unafraid to dazzle the reader with the brilliance of his writing. There were several times in the first few chapters that I highlighted sentences and turns of phrases. Eventually one becomes accustomed to instead of entranced by the poetry of the text and the breakneck forward momentum of the plot demands one’s full attention.

The story in Razorblade Tears is incredibly fast-paced and action-packed. After the two dads Buddy Lee and Ike team up as an avenging odd couple trying to find (out) who killed their gay sons, they start poking around and unearth a hornet’s nest of violent gang members, racist bikers, corrupt rap moguls and drug kingpins who are connected to a conspiracy to keep an explosive secret out of public view. Unfortunately for them, they are up against two guys who have suffered the incredibly painful loss of their only sons and fueled by their grief at the violent deaths and their own shame at their own homophobia that warped their relationship with them when they were alive, Buddy Lee and Ike are ready and willing to go as far as it takes (and beyond) to find and punish the people who have brought them such pain by killing their sons. The body count rises rapidly and by the end of the book vengeance has been meted out but at a price which is significant and life-altering to the survivors.

Overall, I was extremely impressed with this first encounter with the work of S.A. Cosby and I intend to read his other work. That said, I wouldn’t call Razorblade Tears a nuanced or complex book. It’s not trying to occupy the niche of the cerebral, densely-plotted mystery that unspools with increasing suspense and narrative tension. Razorblade Tears is more like a full barrel of bourbon rolling down a steep hill with a burning Confederate flag stuck in its side into a large hole that’s leaking profusely: it’s a combustible, compelling spectacle.

Razorblade Tears story moves so quickly that at first you don’t realize how simplistic the plot is. (It’s very easy to figure out who the person behind the boys murders and other crimes is.) But this flaw is outweighed by the overall message that parents should accept their LGBT children for who they are and not try to “change” or disown them because of some heteronormative vision they had of their (and their children’s) lives.

Title: Razorblade Tears.
Author: S.A Crosby.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 336 pages.
Publisher: Headline .
Date Published: July 6, 2021.
Date Read: March 8, 2022.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★ (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A/A- (3.83/4.0).

PLOT: B+.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A+.