2011 mystery (modern police procedural plus amateur), seventh in its
series. War is not good for people.
Indeed, the framing story is a support group for veterans with
problems, because even the people who came back with all their body
parts intact have got into drug habits, or developed a short temper,
or had unwise affairs, or otherwise found some method of coping with
being in a war zone which it's unproductive to continue with once
they're home. That works well for me; it's rare in my reading that I
meet sensible portrayals of post-traumatic stress, as something that
doesn't necessarily go away just because you talk it out with your
found-family, even if it does get too-neatly segmented into person X
with problem A, person Y with problem B, and so on. (Comorbidity is
hard! Let's give antibiotics.)
And I suspect Spencer-Fleming would agree with me that that is what
the book is about, even though there are also some murders. Has a
war-zone relationship turned obsessive and followed someone home? Or
is it all more complicated than that? (Though someone who's been
portrayed in previous books as a smiling villain is so blatantly
playing the villain here that it's hard to take him seriously.)
Not one for the mystery purist, but I still find the characters and
environment intriguing. (In retrospect, this was the last book in the
series that I enjoyed.)
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