In our diversity-loving modern world, nothing is more popular than various kinds of fusion (perhaps because lots of fusion ultimately leads back to uniformity). Sometimes fusion can work very well, as when, oh, for example, an author blends historical fiction with adventure fantasy.

Other fusions work less happily, or at least it looks that way to me based on reading the fusion of Cozy Mystery with Thriller that is Christopher Amato’s Peace River Village.

The eponymous PRV is a retirement community in Sunland, Florida – which I take to be a fictional town (at least I never heard of it when I lived in the state). In a quiet, pleasant cul de sac, several former police officers have settled down for their golden years, purely by coincidence. There’s a vigorous widow who used to be a captain in Gary, Indiana, and two old cops from Chicago and DC who’ve settled into curmudgeonly routine and torpor. And another cop has just moved in across the circle.

One non-cop is a widow named Cora, whose great concerns are her daughter and granddaughter. The daughter is a degenerating drug addict living in a fetid apartment, but she still has hope for the granddaughter, Jennifer. Jennifer is a good, pretty girl who aspires to go to college. She is close to her grandmother, and spends a lot of time with her.

So when Jennifer doesn’t show up for a promised weekend, and Cora can’t reach her on her cell phone, Cora consults her neighbors, then calls the police. But the police dismiss the girl’s disappearance as a runaway case, and the neighbors start making inquiries on their own. What they uncover will lead to corruption, drugs, and human trafficking.

I’ll say this for Peace River Village – it interested me enough to keep me reading to the end, just because I was concerned about what happened to the girl. But I found the book very slow. The labored jollity of the retired cops’ jokes and the general low energy of their lives didn’t harmonize well with the serious nature of the crime and the victim’s peril. Things got moving toward the end, though, timed just right to permit a nick-of-time rescue.

The writing was labored and overdone – it could have used a lot of verbiage-trimming. The book had the flavor of Christian fiction (though I don’t think it is one of those), except for quite a lot of profanity.

I didn’t like Peace River Village a lot. Your mileage, as always, may vary.