RogerBW's Blog

2011 mystery (modern police procedural plus amateur), eighth in its series. All the fæces hits the fan at once.

For the last few books, this series has been ending with a crisis, something that'll provide setup for the next book; and now I'm starting to feel that the suffering of the principals and consequent emotional drama is the point.

We've established that Van Alstyne is quite a bit older than Fergusson (in this book he's 52 or 53 depending on which paragraph you believe, and she's something like 38), and when they got married they agreed that they wouldn't have children. Now she finds she's pregnant (the wallop at the end of the previous book) and she's decided that never mind all that serious talk and the promises they made, she's going to have the child, even (especially) if it's been damaged by her drinking before she knew about the pregnancy, and Van Alstyne is entirely unreasonable for not agreeing wholeheartedly with this total reversal. And the author clearly agrees with her; what needs to be fixed for the happy ending is for Van Alstyne to change his attitude, and no other way of reaching a resolution is ever contemplated.

Meanwhile Kevin Flynn (young local officer) and Hadley Knox (a bit older, moved to this rural hellhole from California to live with her father and shifted career from prison guard to police officer) try to live with their mutual attraction, and hang on a minute, wasn't "they don't though they both want to" the original premise of this series, that's now been resolved? Now that comes to the fore for this pair, and Knox turns out to have a former career as a porn actress she's trying to keep quiet (wouldn't that have come up when she was interviewing for the prison service and then for the police?), and she's carelessly broken the joint access rules so her ex-husband is going to take her children back, and she assumes Flynn has planted some drugs on said ex (even though Flynn's been consistently portrayed as a straight arrow), and none of this stuff has ever been mentioned before.

I mean, if we'd had some foreshadowing, maybe I wouldn't have found myself saying "oh, come on" as drama piled on drama.

Oh, and there's a kidnapped moppet who's going to die in a few days if she doesn't get her immunosuppression medication. And scenes written from viewpoints other than those of the investigators, thus giving the reader information the detectives don't have and making the mystery-puzzle unfair. And there are some corrupt cops, and I can feel Spencer-Fleming sidling up towards the idea that, hmm, if corrupt cops are a possible thing, maybe you shouldn't give all cops the power to push people around as they see fit, and then quickly running away from anything that might seem like questioning the orthodoxy that Police Are Good.

This was hard work to read, and apparently to write: after Spencer-Fleming had been producing roughly a book per two years, it was seven before the next one after this came out. I admit I didn't feel much enthusiasm for that one, and I ended up giving it up unfinished.