{"id":21509,"date":"2026-01-07T19:49:01","date_gmt":"2026-01-08T00:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21509"},"modified":"2026-01-07T19:49:01","modified_gmt":"2026-01-08T00:49:01","slug":"the-dead-dont-lie-by-blake-banner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=21509","title":{"rendered":"‘The Dead Don’t Lie,’ by Blake Banner"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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On checking my old reviews,<\/strong> I find that I have reviewed at least one book in Blake Banner\u2019s \u201cDead Cold Mysteries\u201d series before. The book I just read, The Dead Don\u2019t Lie<\/a><\/em>, is a prequel to that series \u2013 but it was published just last month, and it actually tells how the Cold Case squad began.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, I have a suspicion (and all such guesses, it should be remembered, are flimsy things) that this book was originally written for a very different character in another time frame, but was re-written to shoehorn it into the Dead Cold Mysteries template.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

John Stone, we are told, is a police detective in a New York precinct. Which makes it rather strange when a sultry dame walks into his office and asks to hire him to deliver blackmail money for her. (The author\u2019s rationalization is that this woman is so alluring that Stone falls for her right off and is putty in her hands.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019s lying to him, of course. Soon John Stone is approached again, by a mysterious foreign man who claims to be working for the Vatican, who wants his help in recovering a stolen artifact. As the story goes on, there will be killing and kidnapping, and Stone will work generally without backup or keeping his superiors updated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If all this sounds like a strange way for a working police detective to operate, I entirely agree. I had a strong feeling that this book had originally been written as a private eye novel, set (probably) in the 1950s (there are no cell phones in view, and at one point our hero uses a pay phone). Also, in one scene, John Stone is addressed as \u201cMr. Lackland.\u201d That, I would guess, is a failure of the \u201cfind and replace\u201d function in the author\u2019s word processing software.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I keep going back to Blake Banner, because I vaguely recall him as an author I like. But in fact, I wearied of him a while back because of the over-the-top improbability of his action scenes. Also, he\u2019s prone to cliff-hangers, though that sin is not committed in this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I finished The Dead Don\u2019t Lie<\/em>, but I can\u2019t really recommend it highly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On checking my old reviews, I find that I have reviewed at least one book in Blake Banner\u2019s \u201cDead Cold Mysteries\u201d series before. The book I just read, The Dead Don\u2019t Lie, is a prequel to that series \u2013 but it was published just last month, and it actually tells how the Cold Case squad … Continue reading ‘The Dead Don’t Lie,’ by Blake Banner<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[3494,5819,5820],"class_list":["post-21509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-blake-banner","tag-cold-case-mysteries","tag-the-dead-dont-lie"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21509","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21509"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21509\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21512,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21509\/revisions\/21512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21509"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21509"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21509"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}