For a while there, I thought I’d found a new series to follow passionately. I liked the first half of Keith Yocum’s The Color of Blood very much. But it faded in the stretch for this reader.

Dennis Cunningham is an investigator for the CIA. He’s not an agent; he investigates crimes committed against, or by, Agency operatives. His strength is interrogation, his chief method bullying. He offends people, gets them angry, and they lower their defenses and unload the truth. He has a high clearance rate, but very few friends, at Langley or anywhere else.

He’s just back from compassionate leave, after a breakdown following the death of his wife. To ease him back into the job, he’s assigned to look into the disappearance of an agent in Australia. Basically he’s just supposed to check somebody else’s work; no big deal.

But when he gets to Australia, (where he’s required by law to be accompanied by a local police officer, who turns out to be a woman who hates him on sight), he begins to suspect that the missing agent is not dead at all. He also grows curious about what that agent had been investigating. And that leads him down paths of inquiry leading to danger, both from bad guys and the unforgiving Australian outback. Along the way, he and his Australian cop escort will begin to see each other in a new way.

For reasons that won’t be hard to guess, I generally like stories about “difficult” male heroes, your Monk/House/Holmes types. I like them even better, for even more obvious reasons, when they get paired up with attractive women. So this story gratified me very much for about the first half.

But then it got out of hand (from my perspective). Dennis’s obsessive risk-taking abruptly ended my identification with him. Unsurprising perils led to not unexpected rescues. Also, there was what I perceived (I could be wrong) as a political message that seemed to me extreme.

So I won’t be continuing with this series. It was fun for a while, though. You might like it better.