2006 mystery (modern police procedural plus amateur), fifth in its
series. Van Alstyne the police chief is known to be on the outs with
his wife, which makes it awkward when her body is found…
All right, this small town still has a toxic masculinity problem,
and if the killer portrayed here isn't quite in keeping with the usual
pattern for this specific pathology, well, there are variations. Fair
enough. But the mystery is a pretty straightforward one, with very few
surprises.
Indeed, I got the feeling that Spencer-Fleming cared more here about
the emotional roller-coaster of the principals (as before in this
series, van Alstyne is married or at least recently widowed, Ferguson
is the local Episcopalian priest, and neither of them really has the
willpower to stay away from each other even though they've avoided
actually having sex). Here they're constantly being thrown in and out
of each other's company and it all feels rather forced.
In particular, the events of the ending don't flow from what's come
before; inevitably of course any events in a work of fiction are
invented by the author to serve their own ends, but they shouldn't
feel as though they are. Fiction that I enjoy makes more sense
than real life.
There's a slight moment of culture shock for me when van Alstyne is
searching a suspect's house and finds some computers:
They must have been in hibernation mode, because they came on almost
instantly. Unfortunately, that was far as he got, because the three
screens displayed a password log-on request. Why would a woman
living alone keep her computers password protected? Why would she
have a three-computer network with instant, always-on access to the
Internet?
I knew at least three women in 2006 of whom this would have been true.
Two of them were running Linux. And everyone I knew had password
protection on their computers…
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