I do love a story of lost love and old mysteries. I found Elliot York’s Dark Lies a fascinating police novel, though not entirely successful.

Logan Cooper is a detective in Santa Cruz, California. He’s a good cop, but he has a tendency to lose control when he faces a particular kind of criminal – the kind who victimizes the innocent. In those cases he tends to black out and use his formidable fists pretty brutally. His superiors have ordered him to see a counselor. They’ve also assigned him to a new female partner, Reggie, and for the moment he’s reserving his judgment on her.

Then he gets called to view a body. A woman has been found in a local lake, drowned in a car with her hand cuffed to the steering wheel. Logan notices a tattoo on her wrist – it’s his own name. He recognizes this woman as Becca, the girl he fell in love with in high school. The girl who, up until today, he understood to have committed suicide more than 20 years ago.

As Logan and Reggie investigate the murder, clues will begin appearing that point to a single suspect – Logan himself. Even he will begin to wonder whether it might be possible that, in one of his blackouts, he might have killed the greatest love of his life.

Sometimes harrowing, Dark Lies kept me fascinated all the way through. Only at the climax did it fall into the pedestrian and predictable (in my opinion). Cautions are in order for foul language and expressions of contempt for religion.

Still, it was 90% a good novel. The follow-up volumes might be good too.