I wrote last night that I’ve given up reading author Jon Talton, so this will be my final review of any of his David Mapstone books. I’m tempted to call it ironic that, the more Talton’s books “improve” (at least in the sense of marketability), the less I like them. But it’s not ironic at all. It’s entirely proportionate, since marketability doesn’t matter much to me. (As sales of my own novels demonstrate.)

David Mapstone, you’ll recall, is a former academic historian, later recruited as “sheriff’s department historian” (cold case detective) in Maricopa County, Arizona. In the last book his boss and mentor, Mike Peralta, lost his job as sheriff and became a private detective, and David came to work for him.

In High Country Nocturne, Mike is suddenly a fugitive. Working as a diamond courier, he has been recorded on surveillance video shooting another guard and absconding with the jewels. David doesn’t believe it’s true, and starts to investigate, but he’s coopted by the slimy new sheriff, who pressures him into researching an old unsolved death.

But soon he finds himself and his wife under attack by an assassin, and his wife ends up in the hospital, close to death.

If I were Jon Talton’s agent or editor, I’m pretty sure I’d be delighted with the trajectory this series is taking. David Mapstone started out as a competent but slightly nebbishy deputy, more scholar than fighter. As the books have gone on, he’s become more formidable, a genuine avenger. All the stakes have been raised. The suspense is greater, the violence fiercer, the explosions louder. As is the case with so many detective series, the thriller element is now emphasized.

Also, the mild political conservatism of the early books has morphed into repeated expressions of contempt for the right.

A continuing, melancholy theme of the David Mapstone books has been his expressions of (certainly sincere) sadness about the changes in his community. As one of those few Phoenix residents who remembers how the place was before the real estate boom, he mourns all the things that have been lost – farms and ranches and floral gardens and open desert, now all subdivided and paved over.

On a much smaller scale, I mourn the decline (subjectively, for me) of this detective series, which started well, but seems to have sold out to sensationalism.