This will have to be a mixed review. Gary Neece’s Cold Blue is a pretty good story, taken as a story. It’s weak, however, in two areas that matter to me. One is simple writing skills—the author’s use of language. The other is a moral problem.

Cold Blue concerns a Tulsa police detective, Jonathan Thorpe, whose wife and daughter were murdered. The crime remains unsolved. Now he’s involved in the investigation of the murders of a string of gang members and drug dealers. A female FBI investigator (gorgeous, of course) comes in to take over the investigation, and suspicion soon turns to Jonathan himself. Not without reason. It’s not a spoiler (since the synopsis on Amazon.com tells you as much) that Jonathan himself is systematically taking revenge on the people responsible for the murder of his family. And his revenge soon extends to members of the police department itself.

The story moved right along, and kept my interest (the ending was pretty satisfying, with some surprises). I had to stop, though, from time to time to shake my head over amateurish infelicities of language. Subject and object confusion, as in, “Having reached a clearing, the barn loomed before him.” Homonym confusion, as in, “Thorpe identified an even smaller click of five [people].” Misuse of words, especially when falling into clichés, as in, “At the conclusion of these chases officers aren’t able to just switch off these ‘fight or flight’ chemicals; they [the policemen] are literally drug-induced.”

These are things a good editor could fix. In spite of my being part of the e-publishing world now, I miss copy editors.

The second problem is moral. Author Neece is, according to his biography, a working sergeant with the Tulsa police department. It troubles me that a policeman would write a book which seems to argue that the police are impotent to protect the people, and that private revenge is the only recourse left. If Neece truly believes that, how does he stay a cop? If he’s only imagining an extreme scenario, it still strikes me as inconsistent with his professional oath. There’s a lot of political subtext here. Neece especially attacks the race-hustlers in the police department who use minority grievances to advance their careers. I have no problem with that, of course.

At one point, Thorpe, the avenger, identifies himself as a Christian. It’s not unthinkable, really, that a Christian who has suffered as he has might turn to vengeance, but it’s problematical from a faith point of view. To his credit, the author wrestles with that, but not to the point of slowing down the action.

In spite of having a Christian hero, this is not Christian Booksellers’ Association literature. There’s plenty of violence (of course), as well as rough language and sex.

I recommend Cold Blue mildly, on the basis of a well-told story, with reservations as specified above.