Thanks to NetGalley and bookouture for the advance ebook copy for review.
According to the tag, this is book five in a series featuring “Detectives Kane and Alton”. I’ve not read the previous four, but I’ll have a comment on this in a bit.
There’s a serial killer on the loose, picking off targets on a stretch of road with little to no cellphone coverage, and not enough traffic for witnesses to be a factor. As the book opens, the prologue has two young women stopping to see if someone whose car has its flashers on needs an assist, as a blizzard is moving in. But the “stranded” motorist isn’t as stranded as they appear, and attacks the girls. The driver gets a whack with an axe, and the other girl flees into the snow, spending the night out in the freezing cold.When the morning comes, she finds that her friend the driver has vanished.
The book then pops over to Sheriff Jenna Alton suffering from a cold or virus, and Deputy Kane in the same house, caring for her. It is not clear what their relationship is just from that series of scenes; I suppose this is something explained in the books previous to this. This is the point where the first couple of problems I have come in.
First, the tagline calls Kane and Alton “detectives” but their titles are Deputy and Sheriff, respectively. This may seem like a minor point, but I selected this based on them actually being detectives, not people with other titles who happen to investigate crimes detectives would ordinarily look into.these things. The second (again, probably only an issue to me), Alton is higher ranking than Kane, so why is her name not first in the tagline?
On we go into the story, where the next problem crops up: the info dump. Kane is injured and walks with a cane, and w get about a half page of telling us what happened to him. A little further in, we have had about a dozen people introduced since the prologue. Too many!
The story moves on in a rather straightforward and at times tedious manner. There’s a tidbit that pops up that also strains credulity: the Sheriff was apparently an agent who helped bring down a cartel, along with Kane, and was basically sent into witsec. An undercover agent given a job of being a Sheriff, a high-profile job, regardless of how small the area is?
As the story goes along, the bad guy makes an appearance, doing fairly nasty but also a little too work-requiring: does the guy not have an actual job?
I had a lot of trouble getting through this. The characters, while interesting, were not terrible deep. There was also an absolutely annoying habit the author had during the dialogue sections: the characters were always doing something and talking. Nobody ever just said “said” or “replied” or “asked”. They smiled or shrugged or raised an eyebrow or glanced or gaped or rubbed their chin or grimaced or stood or waved their hand or did (something) in consternation, like frowned or knitted their brows, or lifted their chin as an example. In one paragraph, the main character shook her head, sighed, shrugged, and glanced. They can just say something to say it without an associated action. It really took me out of the reading.
We then have another abduction (actually two) and get scenes of what the bad guy is doing to the people he’s taken, and why he’s taking them.Things pick up from here as the chase is on, but then one of the deputies does something that would be very silly, given that we now know the guy he’s talking to has to be a suspect in the kidnappings and murders. The fight scene between the deputy (Rawley) and the bad guy is, I think, the best part of the book.
Overall, the plot is okay, and holds itself together well enough, and the readability is fine, too, if you can get past all the things people do while they’re talking, instead of just talking, and the number of characters dumped in at once at the beginning. However, this did not keep me interested enough to go back and read the previous entries in this series.