Review: Nowhere to Hide – Faith McClellan #4 (LynDee Walker)

When your Gran’s dearest friend asks you to investigate something, you don’t ask any questions except where and who.

The who, in this case, is Samson the pig, raised by teenager Kelsey from a runt destined to be culled, a la Charlotte’s Web. Samson, as it turns out, is a YouTube star, and Kelsey’s videos keep the entire family afloat. A note here: Samson the Pig is said to have 40 million subscribers. That would make it a larger channel that The DoDo – one of the largest channels devoted to animal videos – which has somewhere around 16 million the last time I checked. So that part rang a bit false, but pulling down 200K a month did not, based on the (imaginary) size of the channel, and assuming a gigantic number of views per video.

Texas Ranger Faith McClellan, in her fourth appearance, dutifully goes to talk to the family. Mom and the son, Kyle, are not home -she’s told they’ve gone off to a hunting cabin. The housekeeper, with an accent that comes and goes, Kelsey, and her (a tad strange) father are able to answer some questions, but many remain – who would do this, and what possible motive could there be? Kelsey, of course, is brokenhearted.

McClellan walks around the house and the scene of the crime, finding a rather large secret of the son’s rather quickly. She learns that the killing was particularly vicious, with blood everywhere and the killer also decapitated the head (now missing). The carcass she loads up in her truck and takes to the morgue for the coroner to look at. She discovers another hog was also killed, although his head was not taken and the family broke down the body and cooked some of it, the rest going into the freezer.

Meanwhile, McClellen also has to do a bunch of wedding0related stuff: dress, caterers, etc. Her overbearing mother is helping – and by helping, I mean basically taking over all of it. Her fiance Graham is assisting her with the case, which she worries might be the beginnings of a serial killer, and that the killer will move up a bracket to start offing people.

The case seems to have a ton of possible suspects: the brother, a jealous girl from school, the father, the boyfriend/not boyfriend. As McClellen fears, people start dying,even as she and Graham start to get a grip on the case. About halfway through it became obvious to me who the killer was, but it was still an enjoyable ride watching McClellan and Graham make their way through to (livestreaming) denouement.

No terrible slow spots, and in this instance, the bad guy infodump at the end is warranted – it is being livestreamed, after all.

Solid four out of five stars. Plus a desire to go back and read the first three in the series, to see how McClellan came to this version of herself.

Thanks to Severn River and NetGalley for the reading copy.