After borrowing this book from the public library, I found that I’d already read and reviewed an earlier novel in the Jonathan Stride mystery series. I said I found it well written, but I didn’t love it. That’s pretty much my reaction to Alter Ego, Brian Freeman’s ninth in the series. But I read it free, so why complain?

Jonathan Stride is a police detective in Duluth, Minnesota. His two chief subordinates are an Asian-American woman and his wife. Both, needless to say, are gorgeous. As is also his teenaged adopted daughter, a former prostitute whom he and his wife more or less rescued, and who is beginning to reintegrate her life.

It’s big news when a Hollywood film company comes to Duluth to make a movie. Jonathan is less happy than most of the locals, because it’s a fictionalized dramatization of one of his own cases. He is being played by Dean Casperson, one of Hollywood’s major players, but the whole business makes him uncomfortable.

Then a man dies in a freak collision with a deer on a snow-covered highway. His ID turns out to be bogus, and a gun is found in the car. Shortly after that, a local college girl who hung around with the movie people is reported missing. Putting two and two together, the police start searching the area near the auto accident, and sure enough – the young woman’s body is found in the snow, a bullet in her head.

And then she turns out to have been using an assumed identity too.

It’s all confusing, and it’s not about to get simpler. On top of the murder mystery, there are questions about certain behaviors on the movie set, behaviors no one will talk to the police about. Stride and his co-workers (along with author Freeman’s other series character, Florida PI Cab Bolton, who shows up for his own reasons) will have to move fast and smart to prevent very ugly history from repeating itself, not on film but in real life.

As stipulated above, I find Brian Freeman a good writer, and I can find no fault with his storytelling. I’m not sure why his books leave me kind of cold, except for a certain political correctness I sense in their construction. Most of the cops in this story are women, and they’re all beautiful. I don’t know for sure, but I’d wager that is not a statistically accurate portrayal of the Duluth police department.

Ah, but I’m probably just jaundiced. I note that my review of the previous Jonathan Stride book complained about excessively explicit sex scenes. I’m happy to report he seems to have toned that down.

I might even read another book in the series – if I can borrow it from the library.