I downloaded Steve Robinson’s In the Blood because the Kindle edition was cheap, and because I’ve always been intrigued by the kind of story where a modern investigator digs out an old mystery, through documents and (sometimes) the memories of the old.

I found In the Blood, generally, a satisfying read. It’s not in the first rank, and I have some complaints, but for a first novel it’s promising.

The hero is Jefferson Tayte, an American genealogist. There’s an irony in his career choice that he’s very conscious of—he himself is an orphan, and has no idea who his parents were. But he’s become one of America’s most successful genealogists, and when a wealthy client demands he travel to England and Cornwall to clear up a blank spot in a family tree, he does it, in spite of his terror of flying.

Once in Cornwall, he discovers the reason why information has been lacking. A lot of it doesn’t seem to exist, and he can’t locate even the graves of the highborn people he’s searching for. A noble family who should be able to help him stonewalls him. Then he starts getting beaten up, and then there’s a murder and a kidnapping, and the whole thing gets out of hand.

Parts of the book didn’t work for me. Jefferson is described as tall but a little fat, and he doesn’t give any impression of physical courage. Yet he chooses to keep dangerous facts he learns to himself rather than going to the police, for reasons that seem inadequate to me (hey, I know how cowards think!). And his final act of heroism seems contrived, far-fetched, and too lucky by half.

Also the back-story, the account of the original crime that created the mystery, presented both in the form of old documents and in scenes narrated from the omniscient point of view, struck me as both too neat and too messy. Too neat in the sense that everything is solved by what I call “a Castle Aaaargh document” (hat tip to Monty Python and the Holy Grail), in which someone takes time in the midst of a moment of deathly danger to leave a written record for later investigators to discover. Too messy in that it involves several deaths of innocent children, with more detail than I care to be given.

There was also a moment when Tayte meditated on the causes of good and evil, and confidently ascribed them mostly to genetics. I find that jejune, but others may disagree.

Still, I think Mr. Robinson is a promising novelist, and if this kind of story appeals to you, I recommend it moderately.

I thought I’d take another run (savage or not) at C. J. Box’s Joe Pickett novels. I didn’t dislike Open Season, the first book in the series, but I wasn’t bowled over by it either. My response to Savage Run is about the same. Entertaining enough, but it never caught me completely. I think there are two reasons. One is the main character, Joe Pickett. Joe is such a nice, easygoing guy that I just hate seeing put through the wringer as these stories do. I generally like my heroes with bigger teeth.

The second reason, I suspect, is just because they’re outdoor books. As you know if you’ve followed this blog, I’m no outdoorsman. I just don’t identify with people who know how to handle themselves in a forest.

Both these objections—if objections they are—are entirely irrelevant, I think. These very elements are probably among the ones that animate Box’s many fans. Very likely you’re one of them.

Anyway, in this story a radical environmentalist, Stewey Woods, is the victim of a booby-trapped cow, which he encounters in a national forest while he’s out on a tree-spiking expedition. Although everyone assumes Woods was the victim of his own clumsiness while sabotaging a private herd grazing on federal land (one of his eco-causes), game warden Joe Pickett is puzzled by the evidence at the scene. Digging deeper, he crosses a powerful local rancher, and finally comes under the gun of a very dangerous man, a “stock detective” in the mold of the legendary Tom Horn.

Author Box squares the circle pretty neatly in this book. There’s a definite critique of environmental extremism here, but while one of the main Green characters is stereotypically vapid and otherworldly, another comes off as rather admirable. The main bad guy is a big rancher, although I don’t think he’s meant to be typical of that class either.

So it’s a pretty good book, though not among my favorites. I’ll probably read another eventually. I’ve heard an interesting supporting character is due to appear somewhere along the line.

Cautions for language and gore.