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Stephanie Gayle starts with an intriguing premise - a closeted gay police chief in a small town in Connecticut in the 1990s has to solve a murder while keeping key information that might prove personally embarrassing out of the hands of his investigative team.
Gayle does successfully create a supporting cast of characters that a reader will be interested in catching up with in a book two in this series - each with flaws and storylines that are fleshed out enough to allow the reader to get to know and (mostly) like them.
She also skillfully unveils the workings of the tragic relationship that the police chief had with his former detective partner in New York City. The description of that relationship basically took the whole book to develop, yet the pacing never seemed too slow.
Yet there are issues in this series introduction that kept it from being a more satisfying read. Gayle did not create a sympathetic character in Police Chief Thomas Lynch; on the contrary, he comes across as something of a bully and not very likeable. And in fact, he was not in the closet when he worked as a police officer in New York City for fifteen years. It seemed unreasonable to me that the town that hired him would not have found out about his sexual orientation.
A more critical issue to me was the plot twist that had Lynch run into the murder victim hours before the crime. Police Chief Lynch stops a speeding driver who turns out to be an attractive gay man interested in hooking up. They go to a deserted house for their tryst, and stumble over a straight couple there for the same purpose. When the murder victim Cecilia North is discovered, Lynch realizes that she is the woman they had run into in the abandoned house. Her lover is certainly a viable suspect, yet that same person might be able to out Chief Lynch as a homosexual. It seemed to me that Lynch certainly could have come up with a story that would have allowed him to report seeing Cecilia North without having to admit that he was also there for illicit purposes. Withholding that information was a huge error in judgment that I simply didn't believe a seasoned law officer would make.
I also wondered why the author chose to set the story in the 1990's. There was no mention of the AIDS epidemic that was rampant among gay men at the time; that seemed to be a significant omission. And given that AIDS epidemic, one would have thought that a careful man like Chief Lynch would have not been so quick to be hooking up with men he did not know.
The unmasking of the murderer was also handled a little awkwardly. The author seemed much more focused on describing the angst of Chief Lynch that she was on developing the characters actually involved in the crime and their motivations. It felt like there was more of an emphasis on the killing of Lynch's partner in New York City than on the crime in Idyll.
There is a lot of promise in this series - an interesting cast of characters, attractive setting, and secrets galore. Yet the book suffered from a lack of clear focus, with difficulty flowing from the Chief's past into the crime at hand. It also seemed to this reader that the terse, hard-boiled writing style was a bit derivative; I would encourage the writer to explore her own voice more fully.
§ Phyllis Onstad has been a writer, editor, civil servant, teacher and voracious reader. She currently lives in the California wine country.
Reviewed by Phylllis Onstad, August 2015
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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