2018 romantic mystery, fourth in the Mercy Kilpatrick series.
Skeletal human remains turn up in a blocked culvert, with a pattern of
injury consistent with a killer from twenty years ago. And in this
small town, many of the people who were involved back then are still
around now.
Back to relatively straightforward mystery in this fourth volume:
maybe the guy locked up for the killings wasn't the guilty party,
and/or maybe someone is imitating those killings for some reason. The
prepper angle is almost missing here, except as minor background
detail; we do however get a bunch of Sovereign Citizens, whom Elliot
attempts to portray as something other than entirely stupid and
violent, and almost succeeds.
There is one piece of evidence that nobody seems to notice: perimortem
damage to teeth and a skull would look quite different from
long-postmortem damage, even some years later. This isn't crucial to
the plot but it's a pity.
Meanwhile, romantic hero and police chief Truman gets kidnapped, and
Mercy falls apart, which may be terribly emotional but to me was
unsatisfying; the Mercy we've met in these books seems like someone
who would get on with stuff and fall apart afterwards. Yes, I
realise that after a point there's nothing more she can get on with
and she just has to wait, but even so, it felt a little off.
It's an odd situation but the tension works and the resolution is
satisfying. It's quite a dark book but it has several characters who
are bright spots (and some of the good guys don't necessarily go
all-out to cooperate with the police, which is refreshing).
All right, it would have been nice to acknowledge even in passing that
the guy who didn't do it is now going to be released, having lost
twenty years of his life to false imprisonment, but it's an axiom of
this series that Cops Are Good and I think one just has to accept this
while reading.
An afterword mentions that this was intended to be the final volume
(and it ends with a proposal of marriage), but the series has been
doing well enough that Elliot will write (has written, now) two more.
I shall continue.
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