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: 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: Black Rain Falling (DC Digger, #2) by Jacob Ross

Black Rain Falling is the sequel to The Bone Readers, the first two in what is apparently designed to be four novels collectively called the Camaho Quartet. These books were written by Jacob Ross, a Grenadian-born, award-winning author and poet who lives in Britain. They are police procedural novels, crime thrillers set on an island called Camaho (which is clearly a thinly disguised version of Grenada) featuring two psychologically wounded and ethically complicated detective protagonists in Detective Constables Michael "Digger" Digson and Kathleen Stanislaus and a host of colorful supporting characters and criminals.

The Bone Readers was memorable for its immersive depiction of island life while unspooling a captivating, suspenseful story and introducing the reader to DC Digger and DC Stanislaus (who is invariably referred to as "Miss Stanislaus" in the text). In Black Rain Falling, the stakes are higher for our main characters as Miss Stanislaus fatally shoots in self defense a known criminal (who was also responsible for her traumatic sexual assault when she was a teenager) and Digger’s frenemy/boss/rival Malan Greaves uses this incident to make his move to advance his career while crippling Digger’s and Stanislaus’ by dissolving the special criminal justice investigative unit that all three of them worked at by having them all transferred to a new police station where he gets a promotion and Digger's enemies get easier access to him.

However, the central mystery in Black Rain Falling is about how the international drug trade is bringing increased crime that is beginning to impact life on Camaho and neighboring islands. For example, there is a shockingly violent killing, an abundance of “hush money” and an incredibly powerful speedboat that can be used to ferry drugs between multiple islands. Digger and Stanislaus are trying to puzzle out the connections between these pieces before the corrupt powers that be strip them of their ability to do anything about it. 

By the end of the book both Digger and Stanislaus, who have complicated and ambivalent relationships with their fathers will need to rely on familial connections in order to persevere and ultimately succeed.

As with the first book, the reader can come for the compelling characters and thrilling plot but what really sets these mysteries apart from others in the genre is 1) Digger and Stanislaus’ chemistry and teamwork; 2) the verisimilitude of the depiction of the island setting of Camaho (Grenada) and 3) Ross' lyrical writing; the author is an award-winning poet and it shows in the quality of the prose.

Overall, Black Rain Falling is another excellent police procedural written by Jacob Ross, set in the Caribbean with two compelling characters in DC Digger and Miss Stanislaus whom I hope to spend a lot more time with in future installments of the Camaho Quarter.

Title: Black Rain Falling.
Author: Jacob Ross.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 432 pages.
Publisher: Mullholland Books.
Date Published: March 5, 2020.
Date Read: December 30, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

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

BOOK REVIEW: The Back Road (DCI Tom Douglas, #2) by Rachel Abbott

The Back Road is the second book by Rachel Abbott that I have read, after Only The Innocent. These are the first two books in the long-running series of police procedural, psychological thrillers starring DCI Tom Douglas. The series is up to 10 books so far and generally each entry has an average rating above 4.0 on Goodreads with 10,000+ ratings, which is quite rare (and impressive) territory for a series of genre books.

In The Back Road Tom Douglas has left his position at the Met in London and is living in a small suburb called Little Melham when word comes of a young girl who was knocked over by a car and left for dead in the middle of the night. The entire village is shocked when more information comes out that Abbie  had been abducted via online messaging prior to the automobile incident on the back road, which is a short cut that basically only locals know about. Is the culprit someone they know?

The book is primarily told from the perspective of Ellie Saunders, a married mother of two young children who had been driving on the back road to see her lover the night in question and who happens to be Tom Douglas' neighbor. Her husband is a school teacher who knew Abbie and her sister, who was visiting at the time knows something is going on with her sister's marriage but it distracted by her increasing attraction to Tom. Ellie works as a nurse and is involved in Abbie's care and tries to comfort Abbie's concerned (adoptive)  parents.

I don't know if two data points makes a trend but in the two books I have read featuring DCI Tom Douglas female characters have been at the center of the mystery, often prime suspects or at the very least persons of interest with either motive, opportunity or means to commit the crime(s) in question. Also, the mental and emotional states of the women in the books have been complex and mostly hidden from Tom but presented in first person to the reader. In Only The Innocent, more time was spent on the investigation procedures because Tom was on the job then while in The Back Road we see the  investigation proceeding from the eyes of Ellie, the suspect. (Something similar had happened in the first book as well.)

For this reason, I would definitely call both DCI Tom Douglas books I have read so far to be psychological thrillers, because a significant aspect of the text is about learning about the psychology of the main characters and how the crime affects their emotions and thoughts. We also get access to Tom's thoughts and feelings about the crimes, the investigation and the suspects s well as developments in his personal life. This is pretty typical with police procedural, investigator-driven mysteries but what I think is new/different here is the focus on the internal psychological conflict(s) of others besides the primary protagonists. And, I'm not sure that I'm a fan of this particular twist on the genre. It takes attention away from the narrative tension of the mystery itself (who did it, how will "we" figure out who did it and what will the consequences be) which usually dominates works in the mystery genre. That, and the fact that there's not very much diversity in the supporting characters in the books is definitely making me reassess my commitment to continuing this series. If I'm going to read murder-mysteries with non-genre elements I'd prefer to spend my time with stories that have female protagonists (like Jane Casey's Maeve Kerrigan, Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway, Robert Bryndza's Erika Foster and Robert Dugoni's Tracy Crosswhite) or diverse casts (like Peter James DCI Roy Grace and Sarah Hilary's Marnie Rome). That being said, I do also enjoy books with just a plain old white guy as the protagonist (like C.J. Box's Joe Pickett and William Kent Krueger's Cork O'Connor).

Overall, The Back Road is an entertaining mystery novel with substantial suspense and psychological content. For those looking for a more traditional police procedural crime thriller I would suggest look elsewhere but clearly there are many people who appreciate Rachel Abbott's approach to the genre and I can see why.

Title: The Back Road.
Author: Rachel Abbott.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 472 pages.
Publisher: Black Dot Publishing .
Date Published: March 8, 2013.
Date Read: November 19, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: B+/A- (3.5/4.0).

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

BOOK REVIEW: Cross and Burn (Tony Hill / Carl Jordan, #8) by Val McDermid

Cross and Burn is the eighth installment in the British police procedural crime thriller series written by Val McDermid featuring psychological profiler Dr. Tony Hill and Detective Chief Inspector Carol Jordan set in the Manchester suburbs of Bradfield in the north of England. This series is one of the most exciting and compelling entries in the multiple genres that it occupies (which include suspense thriller, British police procedural, and murder mystery). It is also one of the rare series that has both a male and female lead in a primarily non-romantic relationship.

I hadn’t read one of McDermid’s books in a while so I had forgotten about one of the most effective aspects of her books, which is the inclusion of first-person perspectives of future crime victims. By doing this, she connects the reader to the characters and increases the impact of their deaths at the hands of the homicidal psychopaths that tend to populate her books. It’s also surprising because many authors generally use first-person mode to indicate important characters who may be placed in extreme peril and ultimately survive, but McDermid seems to be unafraid of killing off these characters. It's not like they always die or always survive, so the uncertainty ratchets up the suspense in the reader.

As I have said before, one of the added pleasures of reading a long-running series in order that have a repeated primary protagonist (like Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan, Stephen Booth’s Cooper & Fry, Peter Robinson’s Alan Banks or Peter James’ Roy Grace, for example) is the deepening relationship the reader has with the characters due to increased familiarity via repetition. In the Hill & Jordan series, the two have gone through a lot together, especially in the previous book’s The Retribution which resulted in the horrendous death of Carole Jordan’s only brother and his female partner. This happened as a direct consequence of her and Tony’s work of hunting and capturing a serial killer (who escaped and went on a killing spree). It causes Carol to (irrationally) blame Tony for his inability to realize that once the serial killer had escaped that his revenge might have included her family, quit her job as a police officer, and cut off all contact with Tony and her former colleagues in the Bradfield Metropolitan police department.

In addition to including first-person perspectives of victims McDermid often includes first-person perspectives of the perpetrator as well. This is something other suspense thriller authors do as well, but generally not as cleverly as she does. In Cross and Burn, the reader watches with horror while a deranged male chauvinist targets women who happen to resemble Carol Jordan, capturing them, making them play out his twisted vision of a “perfect subservient wife” and then eventually killing them when they fail to meet his insane “standards.” Through back channels Tony is brought in to help with the case by DI Paula McIntyre when she’s approached for help by the teenage son of a missing woman who works in the same hospital as her wife. For some reason Paula’s new boss decides that circumstantial evidence tying Tony to one of the disappearances of a woman later found dead means that he is likely the serial killer the Bradfield police are looking for. The only good outcome of this bizarre development is that it gets Carol out of her mourning funk enough to try and help Tony fight the charges.

Another one of the notable features of McDermid’s books are the (sometimes gory) scenes of violence and torture. She doesn’t shy away from the depiction of the horrors that violent crimes, both physical and psychological, can produce. Despite this, her books are always entertaining, well-plotted and memorable. In fact, overall Cross and Burn is an example of a master working at the height of her craft, cementing her status as one of the best in the business by creating another spine-chilling entry in her long running series.

Title: Cross and Burn (Tony Hill & Carol Jordan, #8).
Author: Val McDermid.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 438 pages.
Publisher: Mariner Books.
Date Published:  October 22, 2013.
Date Read: October 8, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★½☆  (4.5/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A-/B+ (3.5/4.0).

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

BOOK REVIEW: Out of Range (Joe Pickett, #5) by C.J. Box

Out of Range is the fifth book in the police procedural crime fiction series by C.J. Box starring U.S. Fish and Game warden Joe Pickett. Set in the very rural setting of Saddlestring, Wyoming and starring a straight white male protagonist, these are an unusual set of books to be ensconced so firmly in my list of books I heartily enjoy reading. Just like the scenery of the Big Sky country they often describe, the Joe Pickett books are austere, airy and admirable.

In Out of Range, Joe is dealing with some changes in his life as a result of the after-effects of events from the previous book, Trophy Hunt. Some of this change is good, like one of his least favorite people (Bud Burnham) no longer being sheriff of Twelve Sleep County. And some of it is more nuanced, like the fact that his wife and eldest daughter Sheridan are entering the oil-and-water phase of their mother-daughter relationship.

Out of Range begins with the discovery of the dead body of a longtime friend of Joe’s named Will Jensen who was serving as the Game Warden for Jackson (which is described as the “California” of Wyoming) when he apparently shot himself in the face. His boss asks Joe to temporarily take over the territory Jensen had patrolled and he (somewhat reluctantly) agrees to do so. Jackson is a huge step up from Saddlestring because it includes the Grand Teton National Park and if  Joe does a good job it’s possible he could get this area as a permanent assignment, which would mean more prestige for him and a more cosmopolitan life for his family. But because the opportunity is a result of a sudden death it means that Joe has to go to Jackson alone and leave his wife Mary Beth and his daughters behind. Before he leaves, Joe asks his friend (and mysterious loner) Nate Romanowski to look in on his wife and kids while he’s gone and keep them safe.

When Joe gets to Jackson (2 days late because he had to take care of a wayward bear who was getting too familiar with human food) he discovers that maybe he didn’t know Will as well as he thought he had. Will had spent multiple nights in the Sheriff's drunk tank and had even been arrested for violent, disruptive behavior; his wife and kids had moved out several months before his body was found.

One of the interesting features of the Joe Pickett books are the various contemporary issues facing wilderness areas that the author seamlessly weaves into the stories. This time one issue depicted is the popularity of “fad diets,” such as the idea of raising and caring for your animals before  (chicken, cows and pigs) before you slaughter and eat them. And the perils of being in a state essentially controlled by one political party. And the power and corruption of people behind large real estate developments. In this book, these three aspects are rolled into one "big bad."

A new twist in Out of Range is Joe’s surprising besottedness with a mysterious woman who seems to know more about his friend’s death than she’s willing to talk about. (And who happens to be the wife of one of the big wigs that Will was having trouble with.) Simultaneously Joe and Mary Beth begin to have trouble connecting (literally and figuratively) and each blames the other (and especially the other’s absence) for the unhappy/problematic situation they are in.  And there’s an ominous subplot involving some weird threatening phone calls someone is leaving on Joe’s home office answering machine.

Joe has a cellphone but by the very nature of his work he is often "out of range" of communication  and he doesn't really seem to appreciate how annoying/worrying/problematic it can be for people trying to reach him to not be able to do so. Another interesting feature of the books is how self unaware Joe is about the feelings of others and his own feelings. He also doesn't react well to authority and often gets in trouble for doing things that his superiors would prefer he didn't do. He has his own very strong belief in right and wrong is rarely convinced to change his course of actions once he has decided what to do.

In the end, Joe (of course) does figure out what happened to his friend and has a fair number of adventures as he unearths the tensions and secrets that Will was dealing with before his untimely death. And some exciting and important developments occur back at Saddlestring that will be interesting to see how this changes Joe’s view of the way he does his job in the future. And Nate disappears. Again. Hopefully the ramifications of these events will be addressed in Book 6, In Plain Sight.

Title: Out of Range.
Author: C.J. Box.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 320 pages.
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons.
Date Published: May10, 2006.
Date Read: September 13, 2021.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★★  (5.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).

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

BOOK REVIEW: No Other Darkness (DI Marnie Rome, #2) by Sarah Hilary

No Other Darkness is the second book in the British police procedural crime fiction series by Sarah Hilary starring DI Marnie Rome and DS Noah Jake. This time the main crime to be solved is triggered by the discovery of corpses of two young children in an underground bunker who have been dead for at least five years. Cold cases are always the most difficult of cases, and cases involving dead children are also incredibly hard to take for the personnel involved.

I was surprised at how different in style the second book in the DI Marnie Rome series was from the first, Someone Else’s Skin.  British-Jamaican, openly gay DS Noah Jake is still an interesting character but sadly he has less of a role in this story than he did in the first. No Other Darkness is much more of a psychological thriller than Someone Else’s Skin was, and in my estimation this ends up NOT being an improvement. I’m still interested in seeing how things develop in the lives of Marnie and Noah but  this change in tone made me less inclined to continue reading the series. The central, overarching question in the book is “what kind of person traps two children in an underground bunker and leaves them to die of hunger and/or thirst?” Trying to imagine and/or understand the psychosis of the perpetrator and watching as Marnie and Noah try to come to terms with the kind of person they are looking for is a harrowing experience for the reader.

There is one main thing that the series has going for it, and that’s Marnie (with Noah a very close second). In No Other Darkness we learn a lot more about Marnie’s past. She interacts with her “half-brother” Stephen Keele who is still a incarcerated for the double murder of her/his parents when he was a minor. Their relationship is of course complicated and emotionally fraught. Noah also has a complicated personal relationship; his ne’er’ do’ well younger brother is distracting him from his job trying to help Marnie solve the crime.

Bizarrely, Stephen is not the only minor child who has psychological problems in the story. The adopted child of the couple who discovered the children’s dead bodies, Clancy Boyle, seems to know a lot more about their circumstances than he has revealed initially.

The denouement of the book does involve another situation where Marnie is put into mortal danger as her hunch about a suspect explodes in her face. To me, placing your (female) protagonist in harm’s way is just a lazy way to raise suspense in a crime thriller and the very best writers are usually able to avoid this cliche while still producing pulse-pounding plots. I do hope that the author finds other ways to keep narrative tension in future entries because I do intend to find out more about what happens to Marnie and Noah next.

Title: No Other Darkness.
Author: Sarah Hilary.
Format: Kindle.
Length: 414 pages.
Publisher: Headline Books.
Date Published: July 14, 2016.
Date Read: February 7, 2020.

GOODREADS RATING: ★★★★☆  (4.0/5.0).

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.5/4.0).

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