My feelings are mixed about The Wicked Kind, a first novel by one John Turner. I think some narrative mistakes were made, but the author shows promise.

The narrator/main character is Mason Tanner, who owns a California construction company and is an alcoholic maintaining sobriety. Years ago, when he was a young ski bum, his best friend Sam disappeared in a Rocky mountain resort. Mason is convinced his friend was killed by a strange man called “Gary” who chatted them up in a bar and tried several times to get Sam to come stay with him to avoid a coming storm. But Sam and Gary vanished as if into the air, and the police were baffled.

Now Mason’s girlfriend, who was Sam’s girlfriend at the time of the disappearance, uncovers some new evidence. She has identified a series of similar disappearances all along a line on the map. They head for a mountain town where the trouble they stir up brings a lot more push-back than they ever expected.

Author Turner has a lot of talent. His prose is generally good, and his dialogue and characterizations are excellent, in my view.

I thought the plotting kind of weak, though. Mason struggles to figure out things that seemed to me nose-on-face obvious. I kept waiting for plot twists, but there really were none. The criminal is pretty obvious from the start.

And the ending… I don’t know. I understand what the author is doing. He’s establishing Mason Tanner as a detective character for a coming series. But a story of this kind, it seems to me, would serve better as background exposition in a better-conceived full-out detective story, rather than standing alone. There just wasn’t enough pay-off here.

And he needs to learn how to surprise the reader.

Nevertheless, I moderately recommend The Wicked Kind. It’s worth reading. Cautions for language.