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Fiction, Reviews

‘The Truth Will Out,’ by Steve Higgs

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Steve Higgs’s cold case trilogy featuring Inspector Tony Heaton concludes with The Truth Will Out. The trilogy seems to have sold quite well, and it pleased a lot of readers. I myself didn’t hate the books, but I was less than delighted with them.

To recap: Tony Heaton is a police detective in the English county of Kent, placidly approaching retirement in a fairly quiet part of the country. Then he is assigned to assist a hotshot young detective in examining old “cold” cases.

That ought to be fairly low-drama work, though it hasn’t proven so in the previous two books, and it doesn’t in this one. People involved in the crimes are still alive, and some of them will go to extremes to keep the dead past dead.

But more than that, Tony has his own secrets to protect. His partner is itching to look into a particular crime that Tony very much wants left alone. He’s beginning to think he might have to kill the young man.

This reader has trouble sympathizing with a main character who’s making that kind of plan.

And the final resolution left me (personally) unsatisfied.

But plenty of readers enjoyed it, so maybe I’m tone-deaf. The suspense certainly ran high. Author Higgs writes pretty well, but there are occasional typos in the text. And he has an annoying problem with misplacing modifiers.

There was no especially objectionable material in this trilogy that I recall. I recommend it moderately.

Fiction, Reviews

‘The Lies We Tell Ourselves,’ by Steve Higgs

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I reviewed Shadow of a Lie,  the first book in Steve Higgs’s Det. Tony Heaton Trilogy, a few days ago. The second book is The Lies We Tell Ourselves.

A little orientation: Tony Heaton is a detective in English Kent. He had intended to just coast as he approached retirement, but was assigned to a new Cold Case squad headed by a hotshot young detective, Ashley Long.

Tony finds his own long-dormant passion for his job reviving as they dig into old puzzles, but that new enthusiasm is tempered by fear – fear that they will investigate one murder about which he has personal knowledge – knowledge he’s been covering up for many years.

In The Lies We Tell Ourselves, they examine a couple more cold murders, which turn out to be connected. The victories are sweet, but Tony’s guilty uneasiness is growing.

I noticed more typos in this book than in the first one. Also, one of the murder victims is a Frenchman named Michelle – except that’s the female spelling. I’m pretty sure it should have been Michel. This isn’t arcane knowledge; somebody should have noticed in the editing process.

These books are fairly well written, but Tony can be an irritating hero/narrator. Especially due to his blatant hypocrisy when he describes his contempt for people who conceal knowledge of murder, while he himself remains guilty of the same thing.

But that’s character complexity. I imagine it’s working up to a big crisis in the third book.

Fiction, Reviews

‘Shadow of a Lie,’ by Steve Higgs

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English author Steve Higgs has written a trilogy about an aging police detective named Tony Heaton, of which Shadow of a Lie is the first volume. It didn’t blow me away, but it was well-written and intriguing in its way.

Tony Heaton often thinks about the movie cliché where a cop gets killed just as he’s coming up on retirement. He’s coming up on retirement himself, but has no intention of putting himself anywhere near harm’s way. He serves in a small, quiet community in Kent, and though he was a hotshot up-and-comer when young, his career foundered following a mistake, and he’s been coasting ever since.

Then his commander (who loathes him) tells him he’s been assigned to a special project, investigating cold cases. He’s partnered with a young detective named Ashley (male) Long. Ashley is the kind of rising star Tony used to be, and a martial artist to boot. In spite of seniority, Ashley is put in charge of the project, and he steers them to the disappearance, several years before, of a young man in another small town. No body was ever found, so it’s technically a missing person’s case, but Ashley has a feeling about it.

There are, in fact, people out there who know what became of the missing boy, and they will go to any lengths to muddy up the trail. The action will pass beyond raised voices and threats to actual physical battery and shots fired. Tony will find himself closer than he ever imagined to that movie-cliché ending he used to laugh about.

And when the case is solved, a plot twist will arise, impelling the reader to move on to the series’ second book.

Pretty good. I thought some of the action in Shadow of a Lie was a little implausible; on the other hand I never realized before how useful zip ties could be in a fight.

Not a great mystery, but pretty good. A professional job of work. I don’t recall any content that calls for special cautions.