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. Continue reading Cold Blue, by Gary Neece →

Not long ago I heaped high praise on Norwegian author Karin Fossum’s police novel, Don’t Look Back. I’m sorry to say that the book I read as a follow-up, The Water’s Edge, did not live up to my expectations.

In this book, Inspector Sejer, a police detective in a town in the Oslo area, along with his assistant, Skarre, investigate the rape and murder of a small boy, found dead in a wooded area near a lake.

What makes this novel bad (in my view), and bad in a particularly Norwegian way, is what I might call the author’s considerateness. She’s considerate of everyone—victims, grieving parents, pedophiles, and policemen. She goes into everyone’s thoughts and lets them make their own cases. I approve of this to an extent—I like a villain to be three-dimensional—as long as the author remembers which side he or she is on. Fossum is willing to condemn murder, of course, but when a pedophile character complains that society just hasn’t advanced enough to embrace his particular philia, as it is now embracing homosexuality, no really strong counterargument is given. (Or so it seemed to me.) This injects a genuine creepiness into the whole enterprise.

The problem is aggravated by the fact that Fossum seems to have lost control of her characters. Sejer and Skarre, who came off as well-realized personalities in Don’t Look Back, have gotten all muddled. In their conversations, they seem to switch attitudes toward the legal system back and forth for no discernible reason.

And over all stands the fact (in which the policemen seem to take some pride) that Norway isn’t barbaric like the United States, and compassionately puts all criminals, even child murderers, back on the streets after a maximum of 21 years.

The point of it all would appear to be that we’re all equally guilty, but some of us have better luck than others. I accept that theologically (to an extent; I believe in degrees of guilt and sanctification), but in terms of the law it frankly offends me.

So consider my endorsement of Karin Fossum’s work withdrawn for the time being.