Derek > Books: crime‎ (19)

We start with two (armed) EPA agents travelling to small town Wyoming to serve papers—papers that should have been served a year earlier—the men promptly turn up dead. The crime that the EPA is fighting is supposedly the illegal development of a wetland: except that everybody knows there is no such wetland. So we're asked to believe that, first, the EPA has ordered a developer (verbally) to stop work on a "wetland" and to restore it to its natural condition immediately, and that fines of $70,000 a day will be imposed until the site is restored.  In an afterword, Box says that this has really happened to a couple named Sackett in Idaho, and as far as it goes, this is true. However, in the Sackett's case, nobody—except perhaps the Sacketts—denies that the property really was a wetland and a compliance order was issued, which latter didn't happen in this fictional version.  It's also true that only the EPA can define what constitutes a wetland under the Clean Water Act, and that they claimed the Sacketts had no right of appeal. The US Supreme court ruled that they did have a right of appeal in March 2012, well before this book was published. So, really, no, I don't think the scenario described here could have happened.

For the far less consequential, we're told this town is too small to have even one taxi, but a young hooligan that Joe Pickett is looking for is the son of an Episcopalian Bishop. You think? My experience is that Episcopal diocesan seats are in rather larger centres. In Wyoming's case, that's Caspar: population 55,000.

Towards the end of the book, Joe's riding a log down a river that even the best whitewater kayakers only tackle in the spring runoff. That's not the way it works, Mr. Box: if it's dangerous in August, it's worse when the water's high. Think about it. There's more water, moving faster, in the  spring runoff than during the  dry part of summer : Energy = ½mass*velocity²  — more energy = more danger.

So, that's all a long winded way of saying that I was pretty short on the willing suspension of disbelief.  Outside of that, I enjoyed it….

That said, once you get past the coincidence of Billy being asked by a friend to investigate one murder, and being sent to the same location by his bosses to investigate another, the mystery is pretty well done.

The most annoying thing about the book is the cover: it depicts Billy being hit over the head and pushed into a canal. A crime that occurs but is never solved in the book. The cover shows the assailant as being another soldier. Why? It seems a little too specific for the usual excuse: which is just that the artist didn't actually read the book.

There are no happy endings. As with most of Benn's books, this is his way of airing historical dirty laundry: in this case the shameful treatment of black American soldiers during WWII—as Benn points out, to the serious detriment of the war effort.

It's hard to keep interested in a series that has reached 23 volumes now, but somehow Sandford keeps doing it. This time, he ties in all three of h

It's hard to keep interested in a series that has reached 23 volumes now, but somehow Sandford keeps doing it. This time, he ties in all three of his major series characters. Almost since the debut of his Virgil Flowers series,"that fuckin' Flowers" has made cameo appearances in the Prey novels, but in this one we also get a major contribution from Kidd — Sandford wasn't even Sandford the last time he wrote a Kidd novel! And Kidd (and Lauren/Lu-Ellen) is seriously cool!

There's some hinting that he's trying to wrap up Davenport — or at least send the series in a new direction — with the suggestion that Davenport is now tainted by politics, and a change of administration will force him out of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, but I'm cool with that. There's always that fuckin' Flowers...

We're introduced to all the characters fairly early, so there's no sudden introduction of the killer 90% of t

We're introduced to all the characters fairly early, so there's no sudden introduction of the killer 90% of the way through the book. Everything follows logically, without outrageous coincidence (as detective Beaumont says, the police don't believe in coincidences, so why should mystery readers be expected to), and naturally, I didn't figure out whodidit, even with all the clues. 

I must say though that it was terribly dated - this library e-book had a copyright date of 2005, but the DTB was published in 1989. Nobody has cell-phones (Beaumont has a car phone), everybody apparently uses actual answering machines, and computer technology is primitive. How did we ever manage?