2019 romantic mystery, sixth and last in the Mercy Kilpatrick
series. Mercy's hastily dropped into an undercover job, while her
police chief fiancé conducts a separate investigation.
So it's another militia (well, that's basically the series'
premise), and once more the couple gets split up as one of them is
vanished and out of contact while the other has to carry on without
them. And I think it's because so much of this felt like a
repetition of book 4 (swapping which of them was missing, and with
other minor variations) that I found myself less than engaged.
The undercover job goes comprehensively south, because of course it
does. We're told that the militia leader is tremendously charismatic,
and that's why he's able to persuade his followers to hand over all
their money and live in primitive conditions – but we're told it, we
don't see it, so it never feels like a real situation and it's hard
to find sympathy for the victims who fell for whatever his pitch may
have been. There's also no sense of what it's for – nobody's saying
"we need to wait here until the nukes fly" or "when the [ethnics] rise
up in the cities we'll be safe here". It's been an ongoing problem
with the series that these preppers, survivalists, militia types don't
have a legend, the alternate worldview that drives their actions –
while that's been the defining characteristic of the people in that
mindset whom I've met or heard about. I wonder whether that omission
was an attempt to avoid causing offence, or whether the reader's meant
to map in their own paranoias, as with the underwritten heroines of
some romance novels who serve as a proxy for the reader.
For that matter, I got very little sense of an attempt to infiltrate;
Mercy just causes ructions, having apparently had no experience of how
insecure violent men react when they think their authority is being
challenged (and yet she works for the FBI).
Elliot expected this would the last book of the series, so some
ongoing threads do get tied off (and the final chapter is a grand
wedding scene), though others are left dangling. (I gather the main
characters show up in some of her later books but this series in
itself seems to be compete.)
If you're already invested in the characters, well, there's that
wedding scene payoff, but otherwise I felt that this didn't add a
great deal to the previous books.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.