I’m not entirely certain why I had so much trouble reading Dave White’s Blind to Sin. It’s a complex book, and demanded some effort in the reading – and I wasn’t entirely certain I was enjoying it enough to make it worth the work.

This is the second book in a series, starring former private detective Jackson Doyle and current private eye (and part-time high school basketball coach) Matt Herrick. Doyle is now serving a stretch in prison, having confessed to murder. He has many enemies in the prison, but has a protector in Kenneth Herrick, Matt’s convict father.

Years ago, Kenneth was part of a successful trio of bank robbers – he and his wife Tammy, plus their driver, Elliot Cole. But when a job went bad and Kenneth sacrificed his freedom to let the other two get away, their family was broken up, and son Matthew was left resenting both his parents, and determined to live a positive, law-abiding life.

When Doyle and Kenneth are released from prison early, though bribery by Elliot Cole, the two freed men are pressured to join Elliot in an audacious scheme to steal a fortune in government money – and Elliot wants to bring Matthew in as well.

What was my problem with Blind to Sin? I guess one difficulty was that – at the beginning – I had trouble telling the characters apart. I found them very similar in their dialogue (and physical descriptions were doled out parsimoniously). Also, the plot seemed to me far-fetched, and the character motivations, if not impossible, at least highly implausible.

And there’s the running theme that Doyle feels a moral obligation to protect “innocent” Matthew, who as a private eye never carries a gun and therefore requires a ruthless killer to defend him. (In the real world, I’m pretty sure,  being a private eye isn’t all that dangerous, and lots of P.I.’s work without guns.)

In any case, I found Blind to Sin heavy going and joyless to read. There are some interesting themes at work here, but it left me flat.