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Christopher Charles opens his story with a grisly triple homicide in the barren landscape of New Mexico, and the bodies keep piling up from there. Yet Charles isn't going for the gruesome, merely playing out the fall-out of the drug trade, both in his main character's life and in the crimes he pursues, past and present.
Detective Wes Raney, formerly a NYC undercover narcotics officer, has been exiled as a result of his former operations - and a nasty drug addiction gained as part of playing his undercover role a little too well. Now, as he works this present case, the past seems to catch up with him. He has choices to make, but will they be the right ones?
The spare, knife-edged prose of this mystery novel adds to its impact. While descriptive flourish can all too often be overdone by any novelist, the author here uses every tool in his writing box to drive home his evocative storyline. Readers are taken down a dark road, even while toggling back and forth between the eerie present and stomach-lurching past.
Raney seems no more in control of the present string of murders than he was of the former operation that left him broken and estranged from all he cared about. The detective is good at deciphering clues and predicting events, but he is one step behind the killer, and it takes him far too long to figure out the motive that is fueling the bloody New Mexican massacre.
The end is a fitting tribute to all that has gone before, and readers are taken to the brink with Raney at novel's end. The tiny spark of hope the author serves up at this tale's end earns him just one more feather in his cap for a job well done.
§ Christine Zibas is a freelance writer and former director of publications for a Chicago nonprofit.
Reviewed by Christine Zibas, May 2016
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