Nick Finn is an agent with Customs and Border Patrol. Mona Jimenez is a human-rights attorney attached to a firm that provides legal services for people caught crossing the border illegally.

Of course they’re married.

They also wind up being the trope-ish investigative team that looks into the murky death of Carmen,who was caught and placed in a detention center after crossing the border to escape her drug cartel-associated boyfriend. There’s also the spectre of dirty CBP agents, as Finn notices interdictions in one particular office is solely resulting in rounding up people illegally crossing the border, and zero drug traffickers or their mules.

The story takes a bit to get moving, and in my opinion, the actual opening of the book is a little ways in from where it starts here. However, it is a necessity to give us some information on our main characters.

Curiously enough, these two could just as easily been colleagues instead of husband and wife, as there’s no real zing in their relationship. Whatever the case, they do at least work well enough together to investigate what’s happening here and bring a little justice into play.

The setting and subject matter are certainly topical and important, the story is decent, and the writing is fine. Some of the Spanish in the text was not translated in the text – I’m not sure if this was because I was reading an ARC or if this was intentional, but it’s just a note for folks who may not be able to read the language.

A solid three star out of five read.

Thanks to Forge/Macmillan-Tor and NetGalley for the review copy.

An interesting premise, marred by a lackluster ending.

Not terribly long ago, I read The Eighth Sister, by another author. Now, The Eighth Detective (Eight Detectives, for the UK version) is here. Did I miss a memo?

In The Eighth Detective, Grant McAllister, a mathematician, once worked out a math formula for detective fiction – there must exist at least one victim, one detective, and so forth. As a proof of the claims he made, he wrote seven short stories, all of which contain one or more elements of his formula. He called the collection The White Murders, self-published one hundred copies, then moved to an unnamed island in the Mediterranean.

Julia Hart, ostensibly an editor with a small press, visits McAllister on his island, to sort the stories and edit them for publication.

The format of the overall book is this: one of the stories, which w find Julia is reading back to McAllister, then a conversation chapter, where Julia is reading the last line(s) of each story, then points out items that belong to his math theory, and then items that do not fit the story – inconsistencies. She asks if he purposely wrote these into the stories, and he claims he must have, but that his memory after thirty years have passed between his writing does not allow him to recall these things concretely.

There are seven stories comprising The White Murders, each with their own detective of sorts – that is, some have actual detectives, and some featuring amateurs. As each is read and discussed, more and more of the math is brought in, up to and including Venn diagrams. Each story is certainly what could be expected of the time they were written: crimes are solved by deduction and conversation (LOTS of conversation), and while some of the deaths are rather macabre, there are no lingering, lengthy, detailed description of the gore. If you expect to find car (or horse) chases or gunfights, you will be sorely disappointed. Think more Agatha Christie and less Robert Ludlum.

What we do not get, at least for most of the book, is any sort of character development of the two people about whom we should care the most: McAllister and Hart. Hart, from time to time, mentions an unsolved murder back in the UK of a woman with the last name White, and points out that elements of that murder appear in each of the stories. Was the impetus for these stories that murder? McAllister denies this was the case, and claims to not knowing he had placed these real life things into his fictional tales. He does, though, allow that perhaps he did so unconsciously do so.

As we reach the end of the book, we derive that Julia Hart herself is the eighth detective, looking into the very murder she has repeatedly questioned McAllister about. We also get more narrative of what she does when she leaves his company for the day and returns to her hotel, and that informs the big reveal at the end.

I’ll not go into spoiler territory, but all is not as it appears on this lovely island or with McAllister.

Toward the end, the stories became a bit tedious, as did the math. The explanations we get from Julia Hart were confusing at first, given the swaps she’d done with material and the way they were presented, and her “testing” of McAllister. By then, this reader, at least, knew what she suspected.

The stories…well, at least one did not contain enough clues for the reader to actually solve the crime, unlike the larger story that wrapped them. Instead, we get a monologue telling us how things were – the story with the department store fire, for instance, was terrible in this regard, and would be terrible in any era if one didn’t have ESP.

Overall, I’m giving it three stars out of five.

Thanks to Henry Holt and NetGalley for the review copy.

Based on other reviews, I’m solidly in the minority here: this is not the sort of book I expect from someone who has won awards in their field (as the author has won the Shamus award from the ITW). I did not find the book to be particularly well-written or the story one that couldn’t be figured out abut 20% of the way in (based on markings in my Fire).

PROBABLE SPOILERS AHEAD

Sidney “Doc” O’Keefe has been released from prison, where he was incarcerated for ten years after being caught as the wheelman for two of his friends – friends who executed a Chinese family of four at the behest of their boss, a gangster named Rabuffo. Sidney assures the reader that he, himself, did not participate in the shooting of the family. Multiple times through the book, again and again. We get it, he’s innocent, even though I didn’t buy it the first time he told us and was even more convinced he was involved in nefarious doings the further the book rolled along. (I was right.)

Sidney and his wife Penny, along with their daughter Chloe, who is now 11, head to Lake Placid as a family rebonding thing. There they set themselves up next to another couple, the Stevens, and their daughter. Sidney and Penny decide to leave their daughter outside, paying with the daughter of total strangers, to go back to the hotel room and have some sexytime. Sidney finally admits he gave up Rabuffo to the Feds, and that’s how he was able to get his release.

First of all: who in their right mind leaves their child with complete strangers? Second, how is little vacation being paid for? The opening page says they sold their house to pay his legal bills, after which his wife and daughter moved into a one bedroom apartment, then a studio apartment. We get the answer to the former (idiots) but not really the latter.

When they go back out to the beach, their daughter is gone. The Stevens are of no help, and their daughter saw nothing. Thus we begin Sidney and Penny’s hunt for their daughter. They walk through the town, return to the hotel, where House Detective Giselle assures them they are scouring the hotel for her. Everything comes up empty.

They head to the police to file a report. The chief, Walton, makes no effort whatsoever to act like someone concerned for a missing child; instead he all but accuses Sidney of doing something terrible to her, being an ex-con and all. They head back to the hotel, and that night, hear their daughter calling for them. Sidney jumps up and sees what appears to be a man with his daughter. He heads out of the room toward them, and is promptly hit on the head. He shakes it off and goes after the man he saw, dragging him off a fence and pounding the crap out of him, trying to find out where his daughter is.

The next day, the guy he beat up is on tv telling a sob story about how he was just minding his business and Sidney just beat him up. The cops show up, and Sidney and Penny steal a jeep and head for the hills (literally). They find a vacant hunting cabin and hole up there, but naturally, the cops manage to find them in this one remote, abandoned cabin, bring a helicopter along, and start firing grenades at the cabin.

The book had, to that point, only made me shake my head from time to time. After that point, I just sighed and made myself go through the rest of it. It’s all a grand scheme, involving his lawyer, wife, the Chief of police, some weirdo named Gary (who they trust without a second thought, even though the book has already shown they shouldn’t be trusting complete strangers), one of Sidney’s friends from the massacre of the Chinese family, and the House Detective.

What they want is all the money Rabuffo has stored in a vault in his house, since Rabuffo has been fortuitously arrested by the FBI and his house is empty. For some reason, Rabuffo had keyed Sidney to the vault, via optical scan (what, none of them saw Demolition Man?) and entry code. And for some reason, the Feds and police and simply run crime scene tape around the place and then just went on their way, leaving no one at all to watch the place.

There are a bunch of deaths, by bullet and by strangulation by belt, and lost things (and people) found. Sidney lives, just like that – snap! – exonerated, and is reunited with Chloe.

It’s a short book at only 226 pages, and I really hope that the review ecopy I received is an uncorrected proof. There is apostrophe abuse, incorrect use of words that show why people should not rely on spellcheck alone (wrap for rap, for instance, right on page 3), tons of sentence fragments, and phrases that made no sense.

“I’m free, paroled for good if I keep my nose clean, as the rednecks like to say.”

I a fairly sure that keeping one’s nose clean is not just the purview of rednecks (or mothers wiping snot off a toddler’s face, for that matter).

Then there’s this, which I had to read a couple of times to understand what the heck he was saying – not to a person, just telling the reader something.

“You know, the big, black Suburban I drove to the house lived in by a Chinese family who owed my boss, Ricky Rabuffo, too much money.”

What? How about making that better, using active instead of passive voice, and using some of those commas on all the sentence fragments strewn everywhere?

It started off well: ex-con goes to the beach with his wife and daughter. Their daughter goes missing, and they need to find her. It was all downhill from there, with a too-many-people-involved conspiracy, short sequences where we have to question if Sidney is actually seeing something/having something happen to him, and lots of the author telling us things instead of showing them to us.

Two stars out of five.

Thanks to Oceanview Publishing and NetGalley for the review copy.

Lots of telling, far too little showing, and an ending that is anticlimactic.

Teenager Eliza Cook walks in to an FBI field office to confess to killing another (almost) teenaged boy. But she will only confess to Special Agent Lucy Thorne. When she lays out her confession, where to find the body, and hands over the knife used in the murder, she also makes a point to tell Lucy that a particular quote from the christian bible is carved on the boy. Then she clamps her mouth shut and refuses to say anything else.

For some reason, Lucy thinks there’s more to this story than just Eliza’s confession, and of course there is, because otherwise there would be no book. How does she arrive at this? Who knows. The Special Agent in Charge – Lucy’s boss – gives her three days to head to Knox Hollow and tease out any story that might be there. That was too bad, as it meant I’d have to keep reading this.

Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t hate it. I just didn’t really like it all that much. Lucy gets to Knox Hollow, meets Sheriff Wyatt Hicks, who has secrets, Eliza’s family, who have secrets, other members of their church (which is clearly one of those weird, cultish churches) who all have secrets, a deputy who works under Hicks, who also has secrets….you get the idea. It’s like the small town with secrets trope on steroids.

There are also a TON of characters introduced here. Cops, social workers, all the members of the church – if you’re not a fan of large casts, you might want to sit this one out.

Pretty soon, Lucy manages to find out that people – and especially kids – just vanish into thin air in this town, and another girl goes missing while she’s there.

For someone who only had three days to determine if there was something more going on in this secret-filled little town, Lucy didn’t seem to act with a whole lot of urgency. As she went around questioning people, she was often told she should speak to another party, and off she went, pinballing her way from person to person just because someone told her she should. I didn’t find her to be a deductive superstar.

The killer is given away before the ending – and it’s almost, but not quite, the author holding up a giant neon sign with an arrow pointing to the killer.

The ending was underwhelming, given that someone paying just a little attention could have seen it. The rationale behind the disappearances is semi-plausible, since people do oddball things all the time, in the name of something – in this case, in the name of some fundamentalist church. The whole thing wraps itself up with a bow, and all the loose ends are tied up.

Speaking of churches, there are some glaring errors about this cultish fundamentalist church: it’s highly unlikely they would have “Mass” and I’m almost 100% positive they would not carry rosary beads. Those things are part of the catholic rituals, and a cult, even one based on what seems to be the pentecostal flavor of christianity, is not going to have these things in their rituals.

We also don’t really get Lucy’s story: who she is, deep down, what drives her, what her backstory is. It doesn’t mean we need infodumps, but something would have helped me identify with her. As it is, she’s more like a “Hey, it’s that woman!” in a movie – a character actor whose face is familiar, but whose name you can’t recall.

The book shifts through time a *lot*, too. “Three weeks ago”, “Today”, “Two hours ago” and so on. After awhile, this annoyed me. I do not, in general, dislike timestamps on chapters, but if you’re constantly jumping around like this, you’re going to confuse the reader’s sense of time. If you do it almost constantly, then perhaps you should make it a series – even a duology, with all the events leading up to Eliza getting on a bus to go see Lucy to confess in one book, and then Lucy’s investigation in the second. It’s hard to get a real sense of what time it is, at least until Lucy reminds herself for the umpteenth time that she has to put this to bed by Monday, and it’s now (day) at (time) and well, she’d better hurry. But she doesn’t seem to be hurrying, and that’s a problem.

Overall, it’s readable. It simply didn’t grab me, which is a shame because I liked the premise.

Two stars out of five. Perhaps next time, Ms. Labuskes.

Thanks to Thomas & Mercer and Netgalley for the review copy.