The Girls in the Snow opens with a creepy “girl comes home to find parents slain” prologues. From there, we’re zipped into the future, where the same girl is now a woman, working for the FBI.

This opener in the Nikki Hunt series is quite good: Hunt is back in Stillwater, Minnesota. It’s business, this time, though. Two teenage girls have been found dead in the snow, after previously vanishing from a trail. Hunt has been working a serial killer case known as Frost (as he leaves his victims in the snow after killing them), but Hunt knows this is not his work. Still, she decides to stay on and work the case. This is my quibble with the book, which I’ll touch on further below.

She discovers while she’s in town that the man convicted of murdering her parents is getting a new hearing. There are protestors outside the courthouse, convinced that the investigation done at the time was faulty and Hunt’s memory of the events that night even moreso. That man’s brother also wants her to go talk to the man face to face and also review the case notes. She pushes him away, but tendrils of doubt start her questioning the events of that night. Oh, and her ex-boyfriend is still living in town, too, now married – and is the father of one of the girls found murdered.

The investigation into the current day murders starts very slowly, but pick up steam, and when another body is found – this time a dancer from one of local clubs. Hunt and her team pick up that case, too, and soon the two come crashing together, albeit in a way that might surprise readers.

Overall, a good read. There weren’t many laggy parts, and the characters were all pretty rounded out – no cardboard cutout secondary characters here. My only issue was that Hunt stayed on to head up the investigation once it was clear the girls were not victims of the Frost killer. There was a potential conflict of interest (her ex-boyfriend being the father of one of the dead girls) as well as the issue with the potential that the man she’d helped lock away when she was a teen herself would receive a new trial (not to mention the emotional aspect of it all).

Other than that – and I’m willing to overlook this for fictional purposes in a story that’s well done – it was an enjoyable read.

A solid four out of five stars.

Thanks to Bookouture and NetGalley for the review copy.

I did not know that this was part of a series – much less one with 29 books prior to this. This is, though, the final Gregor Demarkian book, as the author died of cancer while writing it. The book was finished by her sons. While this can be read as a standalone, it did not work well in that regard for the reasons below. This may be due to the sons completing it, but the editor should shoulder part of this as well.

This is a slow, slow ride of a book. It opens with a nine part prologue, so all the major players can be introduced, instead of pushing them into the narrative, to be introduced more organically. I found this annoying. A 14 year old boy takes a bus to a prison to visit someone named “Russ” who I presumed was his father. There’s no indication as to why Russ is locked up. In fact, we don’t find out the actual reason until almost the 75% mark. I also found this annoying, as other characters would mention him and that he’s gone nutty into conspiracy theories, almost making it sound like he was locked up because he was mentally unbalanced. But what did he do, exactly?

There’s an old Armenian woman named Marta, who lives in a rent-controlled apartment, and who has arguments with the building’s super, Hernandez, because he wants her to move out of her three room apartment into a single room so a larger Hispanic/Latino family can move in. This doesn’t go over well with Marta, who is a racist, hating the Latinos, most of whom she’s convinced are there illegally.

There’s a bunch of nuns, doing their best to help the community, which is admirable, but there’s also a point where one of the nuns infodumps the history of American nuns via dialogue. They’ve seen seeing a black van from time to time, and worry it’s ICE, come to pick off the adults and children they have in the church/school.

There’s Tommy, the 14 year old, who seems to be smarter and more level headed than almost anyone else in this book.

There’s Meera, from Mumbai, who hates Americans and America, and wants to move back, continuing to add to the cash stockpile she has going right now.

There’s Clare, from Lithuania, who likewise hates America, but who also hates Indians like Meera.

There’s a Latino whose name I forget who doesn’t like black people.

Everyone seems to be a giant, raging racist here.

Marta, who famously does not go out at night, suddenly does, stomping her way to the Adler Properties office. The building in which she lives is owned by Cary Adler. He owns a number of buildings, it seems. He also has various loans that he has to pay on.

While Tommy and the priest are walking, a black van is racing down the street. It loses control, slamming sideways into a light pole. The back doors pop open, and what looks like a large trash bag falls out. It’s a body – more specifically, an older woman, still alive, but in bad shape. I knew who it was immediately.

Then we get a whole bunch of stuff about illegal immigrants and a racist cop. Gregor and his wife Bennis are fostering a 7 year old Latino boy, so there’s discussion of paperwork, etc.

It turns out that Adler is under investigation by the feds for coyote operations – that is, bringing people illegally over the border and getting them to Philly so they can work in his various buildings, if possible. Clare and Meera are both money people, and they move money around to make things seem a bit rosier than they really are at Adler Properties. But the feds are having a tough time, because although they can see that movement of money, they can’t quite pin it down.

ICE shows up at the church to arrest some 70 year old janitor who had a DUI and served his time. Gregor wanders around as a consultant for the police, who don’t say it, but don’t want him there. He doesn’t add much as a consultant.

It takes a long time to get to the point where things start folding in on Adler. I won’t spoil what’s happening with the coyote operation except to say it isn’t quite as bad or as usual for what we consider coyotes to be.

Eventually, the case is wrapped up, with multiple pieces coming together at the same time.

The writing is fine, some of the characters were nicely fleshed out, but this book couldn’t seem to decide just what it wanted to be. Discussion of the currently broken immigration system and abuses by ICE? Social commentary on people living in cramped quarters, barely eking out a living? White collar crime and embezzlement and/or money laundering? An investigation into an assault and then later, a murder? Race relations and how most everyone is racist to their core? Who knows?

It’s very, very slow. If you can’t get through multiple POVs and narrative that seems to add nothing whatsoever to the store, this is not for you. If you’re a reader of the series, you’ll likely find it satisfying enough a finale.

Two stars out of five. Sorry, folks, this was just not for me.

Thanks to Minotaur and NetGalley for the review copy.

My usual disclaimer: this is the second book in the Rachel Marin series, and I have not read the first. However, I was able to read this as a standalone, with little to nothing lost or confusing.

The book opens with the musings of a teacher at the local high school on his ordinary, content life. There’s something he knows, though, and he sends an email to the titular Rachel Marin, couching it in somewhat vague terms, and asking to meet her to discuss it. We can tell this will not end well for him, and it doesn’t. When he answers to door and opens it for someone he appears to know, he is viciously beaten to death.

Rachel herself, and her two children, have settled into smallish town life in Ashby, Illinois. She’s seeing a detective with the Ashby PD, John Serrano, and working as a consultant for the APD. This was one area where reading the first book probably would have helped, but I’m not going to ding the story for that reason.

Serrano gets a call about a house fire and heads out. Rachel isn’t far behind. As it turns out, the house belongs to the (now dead) teacher, who happens to be one of Rachel’s son’s teachers. They find his body in his bed, and several hot points where accelerant has been used. But whoever set the fire has not bothered to try to hide the fact – meaning they are not concerned at all that anyone knows, and very likely want people to know.

The story moves from there into the whodunnit. We get a short intro (no names) to the bad guy’s right hand man, who is instructed to get close to Eric. This is fortunate the next day as Eric is about to get beaten up by bully. But once he’s under the wing of right hand man Ben Ruddock, who now has a name and who looks like a football linebacker, suddenly those types of issues go away. Ruddock invites Eric to join a fraternity of sorts – the description of it sounds like recruitment to some Dickensian group of misfits, with another man, Brice Bennett in the role of Uriah Heep.

As the investigation continues, Eric becomes more and more distant from his mother and sister, and the detectives are not having much luck finding anything as to who killed the poor teacher. Serrano interrupts at 1 AM meeting of the boys Ruddock has recruited, saving one of the boy from having his shoulder ripped out as Ruddock pins him.

Now the bad guys know they’re in trouble, and things get murkier and more dangerous along the way, with Rachel herself being clocked in the head by someone with a gun as she’s following Ruddock and Eric as Ruddock makes his rounds, handing out manila envelopes to various people.

In the middle of all this, someone from Rachel’s past shows up, telling Rachel they should work together because they’re on the same side, but Rachel doesn’t see eye to eye with her on this.

Eventually, the hunt picks up speed, snowballing to a dramatic and action-filled resolution.

The writing was good, and while I’m generally not a fan of continued inner monologues from characters to tell us how they’re feeling, I gave it some leeway this time for Rachel and Eric, as they’re going through a tough time. The relationships between the characters was quite good, and while there is violence, it is crucial to the story and not overly gruesome except for the autopsy scene with the dead (and burned) teacher. I recommend you not skip that unless it’s far too much for you. LGBTQ representation: Serrano’s female partner Tally is married to another woman, and they have kids.

There were a couple of points that could probably have been trimmed just a hair, and the actual scheme Bennett was running seemed to be a tad overly complicated, but overall, it’s quite a good read.

A solid four out of five stars.

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

Ruthless Crimes is the ninth book in the Sophie Allen series. As usual, I’m coming into the series at this book having not read the previous books.

A man hurrying to catch a train for work finds a body in one of the carriages. The authorities are called and the dead man identified. problem: he doesn’t seem to exist. The team begins digging around. I was a bit confused, because while this is tagged with Sophie Allen as the presumed lead of the series, she doesn’t show up until chapter four.

As they trace the dead man, with Allen talking to the higher-ups as it seems the dead man may have been an undercover operative, a woman in a secure facility in another jurisdiction is killed by someone acting as a nurse. As with the dead man, the dead woman seems to also be a ghost. The teams intersect and there is more talking with intelligence types, who think this was some kind of off the books operation dealing with immigrants landing in the country.

During all this, an overloaded boat of immigrants is making its way to shore, capsizing as it gets into the breaks at the shore. Several people die, including a couple of children. The rest are taken to the hospital.

The authorities continue to investigate. The head of the off the books op is apparently kidnapped, held for several days, and manages to escape. She can’t think of any leaks, etc., via which anyone would know about the op or who is running it, and seems a tad sketchy.

More dead bodies show up – they seem to be part of the smuggling crew rather than random murders.

Eventually, it all comes to a head and the perps are caught.

I did not like this book at all. Not because of the content. That was fine, even with the author throwing his politics into things via long monologues by characters. There are more nuanced ways to do this that don’t involve the book pausing so a character can preach a the reader. It simply was not captivating in a way a book should be: too much politicking, as noted, too much characters telling one another the story and telling each other things they already know, just so the reader will. There were also some odd moments where the cops didn’t seem to be terribly smart: in one very striking instance, one of them wonders how criminals could have obtained falsified passports. Seriously? An officer offers to resign because a woman she had interviewed during the course of the investigation turns out to have been one of the bad guys. Not a happening thing. A house they’ve taped off for forensics is described as deserted, almost neglected, yet one officer has his service weapon out. Why, if the place is deserted and only other cops are present?

Speaking of -ly, I have never been one for the hard and fast rule of going through a manuscript and ejecting all adverbs. At the 80% point in this book, I was ready to embrace it fully. for this book, though, because by that time I was supremely annoyed by this book.

There was far too much telling versus showing in this book. Don’t tell me “(Name) could see something was wrong as (Other Name) came toward him.” How? Were they frowning? Brows furrowed? Walking briskly? Running? Scanning the surroundings for a threat? Just ending a phone call? Who knows? This happens A LOT.  Like the deserted, almost neglected house above. A couple of paragraphs after that, the author does give some details as to how the place looks. Dump the tell-y “looked deserted” line and just go with the description, as that will show the reader the same thing, instead of telling the reader and then showing it.

The author gets points for diversity, and for having a mystery involving current events like immigration and systemic racism. I just think the story could have used another developmental editing pass.

Two and a half stars out of five, rounded down to two.

Thanks to Joffee Books and NetGalley for the review copy.

This is the eleventh book in the Ann Lindell series and the eighth to be translated to English for those of us (like me) who generally love Nordic noir.

The titular night of the fire is how this entry to the Ann Lindell series begins: an abandoned schoolhouse, used as temporary housing for immigrants goes up in flames, rapidly running out of control and decimating the building, killing several immigrants in the process. There are several characters introduced – one an immigrant, who ran from the building, one an old man who saw who set the blaze, but does not tell the authorities, etc.

My biggest gripe and level of disgust came when the story indicated Swedes from the area made no attempt to do anything about the fire. According to the man who saw the arsonists, they stood around “as if attending a bonfire”. I had to take a short break from the book at that point, and that was right after the opening chapter.

In the meantime, someone has called the police, wanting to speak to Ann Lindell, the detective attached to the local station. But she no longer works there, leaving after her mentor retires. She now lives in a cottage in the village, making cheese , while still acknowledging to herself that she misses the thrill of the chase.

Anyone who has ever lived in a small town knows that small town folk tend to be guarded, and small towns usually have tons off secrets. Ann is drawn into the investigation, feeding the information she susses out to a former colleague. When additional fires break out, she does the same. There are also bombs going off, in the village, and in Stockholm. Are all these things related? And where is the missing immigrant? Is he the one going around doing this? If so, why?

Many current issues are brought up in the book: immigration, xenophobia, racism, and so on. Ann fights through all of these things in addition to the tight-lipped nature of her village. Eventually, the mystery is solved, but while on vacation, Ann is approached by a man who works for the national police, and cryptically tells her perhaps they will meet again when she walks away. Will she be drawn back to the work permanently and officially? I suppose we’ll need to read the next book to find out.

Overall impression: it does go heavy on current events, as noted. On the plus side, the book works just fine as a standalone, so reading the previous books in the series, while informative, is not necessary. Ann is a complex, deep character, without some of the tics/schticks that some writers put in place to make their characters memorable for reasons other than whatever it is they do in the story. The story is good, the investigations are carried out competently, without anyone suddenly doing anything completely out of character.

On the downside, at times the narrative got a bit clunky, but this could be more about the translation than anything else, as is not always easy to translate something and have it retain the same flavor as the original. The pacing drags just a bit, and there are numerous characters the reader has to track throughout, and this may be an issue for some people. The issues that pop up in the story may be a tad depressing for some people, and at times threaten to overwhelm the entire narrative. if you’re looking for a fast-paced mystery, this is not the book for you.

I’m giving it a solid four out of five stars. Ann is what really carries this book through to the end.

Thanks to Minotaur/St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley for the review copy.

Quick note: I know this was an uncorrected ebook, but the formatting of it was DREADFUL. Hopefully, they get it under control for the release.

Detective Deb Metzger, who was to speak briefly at an event hosted by Nancy Leclerc, scion of a hotel chain, is asked to take over the keynote speech, which was supposed to be given by Dan Routh, a former policeman, when Routh doesn’t show. She hesitantly agrees.

Routh, it turns out, has been murdered, his body found in a Dumpster. Detective Erik Janssen, Deb’s partner, is on the scene where the former policeman and now quasi-social worker has been found.

The duo are assigned to investigate, and the first person they wind up speaking to is Gordy, Routh’s sponsor in AA. Gordy’s one of the most delightful and funny characters in this book – clearly wanting to o good, and right by Routh, but he also clearly has a case of scattershot thinking. After collecting the information he has, they continue on, following Routh’s footsteps.

They find that Routh was lately working primarily with a girl named Luna – a fetal alcohol syndrome baby who grew up to be a talented musician. But she is in the wind, leaving Erik and Deb to start digging around in her life as well, trying to find her.

There’s a secondary plot involving Jaelyn, an accomplished pianist, who may or may not know Luna, but who is definitely seeing Ray, a drug dealer – and carrying cash and/or product around for him.

By this point, we have a good reading of the two detectives’ personalities: divorced Erik, quiet, and prone to going off to do something without telling Deb. Deb, single after breaking up with her last girlfriend, but seeing a possible new love interest in Jude, right hand to the imperious Nancy Leclerc.

As the story progresses, the overall investigation gets both broader but also more intently smaller, focused on Jaelyn’s drug dealing boyfriend, another young man who seems to be ready to spill his guts, and someone within Nancy’s inner circle.

Erik and Deb doggedly follow the clues, resulting in the arrest of the killer and a rather satisfying ending.

While there were a couple of draggy spots – the neighbors and voles/gophers, for instance – overall the book is quite readable and there weren’t any gigantic plot holes to run trucks though en route to all the pieces of the investigation dovetailing quite nicely at the end.

A solid four out of five stars.

Thanks to Coffeetown Press and NetGalley for the review copy.

Annie is a quiet, socially awkward young woman in love with her boss Paul, and thinks Paul feels something for her in return. After having a bit too much to drink at a company function, she talks just a tad too loudly about he relationship she sees between them, and is escorted to the door by am embarrassed Paul.

She knows where Paul keeps his spare keys, though, so while Paul continues at the pub, she goes into his apartment to wander around, leaving her nametag in his bathroom and taking a tiny statuette f a baby she had given him from his mantel. There is a moment she believe she is caught, after hearing voices outside his apartment, and once the voices have faded, she leaves, returning Paul’s spare keys to their hiding place.

Flushed with the success of her mission, she drunkenly makes her way back to the train station and then to her car, sits there for an hour or so, and then heads home.

From there, everything seems to go downhill for Annie. While Paul does not directly accuse her of being in his apartment the next day, she thinks he knows she was. In addition, a girl has gone missing from Annie’s area, and from a CCTV that captured the last known movement of the girl, Annie knows it is her car Chloe passes in front of. But Annie did not see her: she was not paying attention to anything outside. Feeling badly, she joins in the searches for the girl, but the others in the group she’s assigned to find her both weird and a little creepy due to her awkwardness.

After some hesitation, Annie finally calls the police to tell them she may have been the last person to see Chloe, even though she didn’t actually see the girl. When the police visit, she tells them this. But there are questions about her timeline, and they want to know why she didn’t actually see the girl who passed right in front of her. She has no good answer, of course, other than she was drink, but she can’t tell them that.

When people find out Annie has been interviewed by the police, suddenly the shy, awkward girl is the center of attention in the office. She enjoys it for awhile, but finds that being unable to give up any real meat about the case returns her to her lonely world.

During the searches, Annie sees that Chloe’s two best friends are behaving oddly. She doesn’t mention this to the police, makes a few (awkward, of course) mentions of the friends to her search team, and it’s clear they wish she was anywhere except with them.

After Chloe goes missing, and between scenes of the present, we get flashbacks to Annie’s childhood. Known as Lottie then, one day two older girls want to include her in a secret club that involves pixies (fairies). creatures Lottie is fascinated by. The girls draw her in by setting trials she has to complete, which she does, and the last of those is a rather heinous one: sacrifice.

All of this informs Annie’s rather odd development and her awkwardness in her adult life. Eventually, Paul confronts her about being in his apartment, but doesn’t fire her. The searches are called off, and the press gets wind of Annie’s past, then police return to question her some more, and eventually, her lie is going off the rails and she considers that she may need to flee.

But then a shocking conclusion brings the entire case crashing down: more secrets are revealed, and we find that sometimes, those closest to you can be the worst for you.

It’s a great story, and Holmes captures the shy, awkward kid turning into a shy, awkward adult incredibly well. There are no major plot or character issues, and this one gets a 4.5 out of 5 stars from me, rounded up to five.

Thanks to Agora Books and NetGalley for the review copy.

This will be part review and part storycraft (including consistency) and will contain spoilers. It also describes some of the gore in it. The book also deals in child abuse. If you want to read this book, or you’re not a fan of child in danger books, you may want to skip this review. It’s also fairly long.

Good? Good.

Crimson Lake Road is listed as “Desert Plains, #2” on Goodreads. As is the case in many of my reviews, I’m parachuting into a series after the characters have been established. It isn’t really apparent in this book that it’s #2 in a series on the cover (in fact, it doesn’t mention it at all) and past events aren’t really brought up in terms of these characters working together as a group, so it can and does work as a standalone, although reading the first will certainly inform the second.

The book opens with a horrific scene: a woman in a tunic on a kitchen table, her head obscured by bloody gauze. FBI agent Cason Baldwin and Detective Lucas Garrett (and everyone else in the entry team) believe the woman is dead. Until she starts flailing around.

We then cut to a bar, where (super smart) Jessica Yardley, currently working for the US Attorney’s office, is telling Baldwin she’s leaving the office and moving somewhere that she doesn’t have to see the terrible things she (and he) have seen. She agrees with her boss to work on this particular case and bring New Guy (Kyle? Don’t recall, he’s annoying and a cartoony frat boy know-it-all who has zero character development despite the fact he will be working this case) up to speed and get him going on it. New Guy’s schtick is having a sucker in his mouth all the time – even in court, and having to have the judge to tell him to ditch it. Even a frat boy would know this is not acceptable, come on.

Yardley goes to see the victim, whom they believe is the second victim of a killer using a series of four paintings as inspiration. The first, a woman named Kathy Pharr, did not survive. Yardley befriends woman #2, Angela River (“Call me Angie.”), telling herself there is no reason they can’t be friends. OK, I’ll push my disbelief that a prosecutor – even one leaving – would get emotionally involved with the victim of an open case in this way, even if Yardley seems desperate for friends and finds River a willing ear. The way things work out, however, it does seem that Yardley makes pretty bad choices about the people she wants to be in her life.

Meanwhile, everyone is trying to determine who the killer is, and delving into Pharr’s life to see if there are connections between her and River. There don’t seem to be any, but they keep digging, reinterviewing everyone. There’s an intimation that River’s fiancee, Dr. Michael Zachary, could be the killer/attacker, based on a profile developed by the FBI. The BAU, in fact (who develop such profiles) is on the verge of being shut down, which brings some tension into Baldwin’s life, since that’s his department.

We get some references to Yardley’s teenaged daughter Tara, and Yardley tells her new bestie that she was once married to a man who was a serial killer (this is apparently what the first book is about) and had a relationship with another bad guy. Tara is described as some kind of math savant and super smart, and we find out that she has been secretly visiting her (super smart and super manipulative) father on death row, while telling her mother she’s working in the robotics lab at the university.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I love a good, morally grey character. I’ll even root for bad guys if they’re doing good things. But I want consistency. Barring some catastrophic event, for instance, an FBI agent isn’t going to suddenly rob a bank. Yardley is conscientious and wants bad guys found and punished for their wrongdoings.

That’s why it bothered me that when Tara and a friend are at River’s house, and River leaves, Tara calls Yardley, knowing Yardley wants to snoop around a bit. When Tara asks her “That’s what you wanted, right?”, this should have been a sign to Yardley to rethink herself. Instead, she does go snooping, and in doing so, finds a garage with gauze, etc., that indicate Dr Zachary could be their man, and calls Baldwin to get a judge to sign a warrant to search River and Zachary’s outbuildings. Baldwin does write the warrant but does not get a chance to get it under a judge’s pen, so Yardley takes it, thin as it is, and gets it signed. This should have been another sign to Yardley. But it isn’t.

When the warrant is served, River naturally accuses Yardley of getting close to her solely for the purposes of arresting Zachary, and storms off – rightly so, in my opinion. But, River gets over it, and they’re again friends as the book moves suddenly to the viewpoint of a defense attorney, previously not introduced to the reader, by the name of Dylan Aster. If you asked me to point to the character I’d be most interested in reading a book about, it would be Aster.

It seemed to me that Methos was having much more fun writing the parts with Aster – from describing his antics in getting himself held in contempt during a trial in front of a particular judge so that judge would likely have to recuse himself from any case Aster was involved with, to the play he made to have himself be able to be present while the grand jury was seated for Zachary’s indictment. Aster was irrepressible, and those scenes both lightened he mood during the middle of the book, but also helped carry the middle along. Often, the “sagging middle” is quite a problem for writer and reader alike, but Methos has avoided that here for the most part.

Kathy Pharr’s daughter, Harmony, goes missing. Her father Tucker, recently released from prison after being convicted of snatching and murdering a girl about Harmony’s age, has seen nothing, heard nothing, and is generally unhelpful. He also talks like someone from an Appalachian holler. I’m supposing this is because we’re told he has something like a 5th grade education, and is not terribly bright, so of course he’d speak poor English and have a southern accent, living there in Nevada. Baldwin finds the girl’s necklace and her phone, but not the girl herself. Since Zachary was remanded without bail, so could not have taken the girl himself, the group posits that perhaps Zachary and Tucker were working together. An independent crime reporter has been hovering at the edges of the investigation, and Yardley encounters him while she and Baldwin are working a piece of the case, interviewing a drug addict who claims to have seen Harmony. She thinks it’s interesting that he was nearby, but then thinks nothing more of it.

Meanwhile, in a subplot involving Tara, she is doing some work for her imprisoned father, selling his artwork. She changes her appearance and goes to some very sketchy warehouses to meet some equally sketchy bad dudes. This does not strike me as the actions of a supposed very smart person, and although Tara is described as a “savant”, she’s not someone who cannot function in society. She knows it’s dangerous, she knows her father is dangerous, yet she tells her mother nothing of all this (and Yardley doesn’t ask, even though a 17 year old seems to be at a college lab at all hours, every day).

The drug addict is then found hanging by his intestines in a house at Crimson Lake Road. This scene is not described in details, but the original painting that inspired it was. If you’ve seen the movie Hannibal (the film, with Anthony Perkins and Julianne Moore), the scene where Hannibal kills Inspector Pazzi will give you a good idea of it.

The group finally begins to realize that Zachary is not guilty, and looks even more closely at the original incident for which Tucker went to prison, which occurred in another town. Baldwin is close behind her, but Yardley is abducted before he arrives. When she comes to, she realizes she’s in a basement, and Tucker is strapped to a table, naked. The character who snatched her – who we guessed was the crime reporter – leaves the basement for a minute, and Yardley opens the small window to get out, but is unable to do so before their captor returns, and quickly hides in a closet. Their captor goes charging out to chase down Yardley, who manages to get out of the house for real and begins running. The bad guy is almost on her when Baldwin arrives on..I mean in…his Mustang to clip the bad guy and then cuff him.

Yardley’s fine, for the most part, and Tucker has been rescued, but is under arrest, as they’ve discovered Tucker used to live on Crimson Lake Road, and his family had other land there back in the day. While Tucker is lying in a hospital bed, cuffed to the rail, a nurse comes in, supposedly to give him pain meds, but really to inject him with something that will paralyze his muscles but will keep his heart and brain working while she slices and dices him to remove all his organs like the fourth painting.

We’ve already guessed that River is involved in these killings. When Yardley goes to River’s house, she sees that River has left in a hurry. Good thing they were BFFs, and River told Yardley where she’d go if she left the area. Yardley calls San Pedro to let them know there’s a fugitive in their area. She goes herself, finds Sue Ellen/Angie, who has Harmony with her. Yardley tells River she’s decided not to leave the US Attorney’s office after all, and that she’s going to move to the crimes against children section. Baldwin, for his part, has also told his boss he wants to move to the crimes against child department, which I suppose means the series will continue with these two working together in books detailing the number of ways people can be horrible to kids. I’m not squeamish, and I know these things happen, but I know I’ll also pick something else to read if it’s a choice between that and something like this, even if the bulk of the horrible acts of violence are left offscreen.

Remember consistencies? It was VERY difficult for me to believe that Yardley would just let River walk away – and take Harmony with her, even though I understood River’s motives. But she does just that, and I had been rooting for her to find her integrity again. Alas, I was disappointed. Hopefully, in the next book, Yardley will reflect on her choice to get too cozy with the victim of a case.

Four stars for a good premise for the murders and not just the investigation, but the way some investigators stop looking at things closely once they think they have the perp – looking at you, New Guy. Two stars for inconsistency and inaction/blind eye in Yardley. We’ll go with the middle and give it three stars out of five. Worth a read if you’re not too squeamish.

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