The grisly dismemberment of the popular mayor during Oktoberfest in a California mountain village sets off a ripple of fear. Everybody hated him;nobody will talk to Sheriff's Detective Dex Stafford.
A forest fire burning in the mountains surrounding a remote California village interrupts the Oktoberfest celebration, followed by the discovery of the mayor who has been beheaded. Sheriff’s Detective Dex Stafford concludes everybody hated the mayor for different and very good reasons, but nobody will talk. His nerves fraying, Stafford finds himself involved with his partner’s hysterical daughter, at a time when he fears his partner is on the take. His mother moves in with him, bringing a Jack Russell who hates him, and stories about his father he doesn’t want to hear.
Patrol Officer Holly Seabright of the village’s security force becomes a prickly ally in uncovering the hints and whispers of something much worse than the murder of the mayor. Stafford pools resources with the attractive and smart patrol officer on a twisted trail of discovery as winter and the big snows shut down the town. A killer beyond his imagining haunts the town. Sometime soon, unless he can stop it, there will be another death, and then still another.
Excerpt
Chapter One
Security Patrol officer Holly Seabright crawled out from under the deck of a house where the resident had called to say she thought she heard a rattler. Nothing there. Probably raccoons.
Her mobile phone rang. She brushed cobwebs out of her curly black hair, stood, and thumbed on the radio, spanking dust off her uniform pants.
“Shots fired up on Shasta Drive at the intersection of Becker.” Lorna the dispatcher/receptionist at the town hall panted into the radio. Excitable at the best of times, her words tumbled over each other.
“Gunfire? Confirm. Over.”
Holly gripped the mobile radio. Damn. Up to that moment, it had looked like fistfights would be the biggest problems of the three-day weekend festival in Sierra Mountain Village, California. The usual issues security patrol dealt with were barking dogs, checks on old people to make sure they were okay, and domestic abuse. Even from her location halfway up the 7,500-foot peaks that surrounded the village, she could hear the noise of ten thousand revelers who had come to the Oktoberfest weekend to get drunk and maybe get laid.
"Yeah, somebody’s shooting. Gunfire. Oh my God, Holly, be careful−I mean, just be careful."
"Is this all the information you have?"
"Yes. Yes. That's all. The receptionist's voice rose. I'd tell you, Holly."
“Copy that," Holly Seabright interrupted, keeping her tone flat. "Call the sheriff. Where's the boss?"
"He isn't answering."
"Keep trying. I'll go up and take a look. Over." Holly thumbed off the radio in the midst of the receptionist’s excited chatter. She headed the patrol vehicle up the mountainside, climbing to Shasta Drive past redwood cabins, caboose houses from the 1970s, and the occasional McMansions overbuilt on Sierra Mountain Village’s small lots. The road ascended in curves upward, then curled back and twisted in hairpins, wrapping around stands of dry chaparral, hedged with sage and juniper.
Not really expecting to hear anything, Holly caught the ratatatat of gunfire−loud−the moment she got out of the patrol Jeep. It didn't sound like gang warfare or some drunk chasing his wife through the forest. More like target shooting. The Jeffrey pine, piñion and scrub oak grew thick where a trail led off into the forest. She could see nothing from the road.
Standing at the edge of the road, she called out, “Hey, there. Who’s shooting? Cease firing.”
Gunfire continued. She waited. When the firing ceased, she called out again. No response.
She spoke into the radio. “Confirming gunfire. Where’s the boss?”
“He’s on his way up. Seven minutes.”
“What’s the word on the sheriff’s deputy?"
“I'm trying to find the one who’s based here for the festival. But it’s absolutely crazy here," Lorna said, completely abandoning radio protocol. "Wall-to-wall people. Another deputy is coming up from the substation, but it’ll be like twenty minutes and that’s flying.”
“I'll stand by till he gets here. I don’t know what I’m walking into. Over.”
Holly clicked off the radio, listening to the steady gunfire. When it stopped, she tried calling out again to the shooters, keeping well out of range of small arms fire. No response. A few hundred yards up the road sat a rusted white pickup. She copied the license number, then walked toward it and looked inside. Nothing alarming. She went back to pace beside the Jeep, waiting for Patrol Chief Ed Bradley to appear.
Sierra Mountain Village was a little town of one thousand full-time residents, twice that on the weekends. Many of the full-timers were commuters who made the hundred- to two-hundred-mile loop to work in the morning, heading for jobs in Los Angeles to the south or Bakersfield to the north, stumbling home dead-tired at night. Rich people in million-dollar McMansions lived side by side with retirees on fixed incomes in 70’s A-frames. On the same road circling up the side of the mountains were mortgaged-to-the-hilt, modest three-bedrooms belonging to struggling young families. A wave of foreclosures and short sales had swept through all the mountain communities, a string of hamlets stretching the twenty miles to the interstate.
Holly Seabright, a four-year veteran of Sierra Mountain Village security patrol, hardly noticed the glorious, mountain scenery and far-off peaks brilliant in late-afternoon sunshine. The sight was blurred with the fatigue of a shift in which too many things had already happened. Holly had been on the go since seven that morning, watching, intervening, patrolling, and trying to head off any trouble that arose at the festival grounds near the town hall and village center.
The last thing the department expected was gunfire high up in the residential area.
She paced, listening. Finally she heard the whine of the Jeep engine coming up the steep grade. The vehicle driven by Ed Bradley, her boss and the chief of the Security Patrol department, pulled to a stop. He got out of the vehicle and walked toward Holly at the deliberate pace he did everything.
“Hear that?” Holly said, tilting her head towards the forest and the continued sound of gunfire. “Target shooting, I figure.”
He listened. "Try calling out?"
She nodded. “Several times. Can't get a response.”
Ed went back to the Jeep, got the bullhorn, and snapped it on.
“Shooters. Cease firing. Cease firing.” The gunfire stopped. “This is Sierra Mountain Village patrol. Please walk toward the sound of my voice.”
From the forest came the sound of derisive male laughter. Holly and her boss looked at each other. Bradley repeated the message. One shot was fired, followed by more laughter.
“I don’t need this today.” Bradley hitched up his pants and pulled his patrol cap down on his forehead. “Stay where you are and cease fire," he said into the bullhorn. "We are approaching you on the path from the road. Cease fire.”
“You’re not going to wait for the sheriff?” Holly asked.
“The deputy got called to a fight at the bar in the village, and all hell’s broke loose with a big rig wreck on the freeway. The sergeant at the substation told me to observe and report. So that’s what we do.”
With real misgivings about officer safety, Holly followed Bradley up the path. The patrol department had no law enforcement authority, no weapons other than a baton and pepper spray, and strict limitations on the use of force. What were they walking into?
They found two guys in a clearing sitting on a stump nursing beers, both twirling H&K P9s. One, a Pancho Villa look-alike, wore crossed bandoliers over a bare chest, sunglasses, camo shorts, and combat boots. The other guy, who was built like a cast-iron stove, wearing a leather vest over a hard big gut, got to his feet and grinned at them, showing bad teeth and attitude.
“So, fellas, heard you doing a little shooting,” Ed said easily.
“So?” A mean-ass, high-mileage motherfucker with a gun. Holly sucked in a breath.
“Well, this is within Sierra Mountain town limits and there's no shooting allowed.”
Mr. Cast Iron Stove jeered. “So what are you going to do about it? Fine me?”
“I'm going to ask you real nice to stop.”
“Or is your fine-looking lady friend there going to make me?” He leered toward Holly, who curled her lip in disdain. His smile grew wider, a stupid cruel smile.
“Any report we have of shooting within town limits goes straight to the sheriff, and he'll be here in five minutes. Sorry, can’t be helped. That already happened before I got here.”
“Oh, see me shivering in my boots.” Cast Iron Stove set down his handgun. He did a little strut, adjusting his gut under his belt.
“So, can I count on you two to pack it in?” Bradley said. “Why don’t you go down to the village? Lots of things to do. Big concert. They do a nice barbecue.”
Holly stood beside him, watching.
“When we feel like it,” Bad Teeth sneered.
“Fine by me. Long as you stop shooting, you're welcome to stay,” Ed said with a nonchalant smile. “We'll just wait out by the road for the sheriff to show up. Give you a chance to think about it.”
He turned and winked at Holly as he passed, heading down the path back to the road.
“Wannabe rent-a-cop oink oinks,” she heard from behind her.
The taunt made Holly burn. Ed sloughed it off. Holly knew that he had bigger problems to think about.
They waited on the road, standing beside the town vehicles, listening. Mr. Bad Teeth walked out carrying the cooler. When he saw Holly, he turned and swaggered back up the trail. Couldn't back down in front of a woman.
"They don't want to be here when the sheriff arrives," she snorted.
"That's what I figure." Ed took another call and ordered Holly to follow him down the hill. "There's nothing more we can do here."
∞
Four switchbacks into the mile-long descent down the steep curving road to the flat land of the valley, the radio sounded again. Holly clicked it on.
“Anybody? Anybody?” The radio came alive with the receptionist's shrill voice.
“Unit Four,” Holly said.
“Fire! Fire,” she hollered into the mike so loudly that Holly pushed the radio two feet away.
“Why are you calling us, Lorna? Call the fire guys at the station. Call the sheriff, the Forest Service," Bradley interrupted. "Over."
“I did, I did. I did that. That was the first thing I did.”
“Good. Now, slow down. What's the address? Over.”
“Same place you were. Up on Shasta. Oh my God, what'll we do with all these people here?”
Ed Bradley’s voice crackled. “Get off the radio, dammit, Lorna. Unit Four, Holly, head back up.”
“Unit Four, boss, making a U-ey at Sycamore.”
“Gunfire probably ignited dry leaves where the shooters were,” the boss said. By the end of September the underbrush was so dry, a spark could set off a firestorm.
If the fire caught hold, how in hell would eight security patrol officers and a few deputies evacuate ten thousand partygoers ahead of a forest fire? Holly gunned the Jeep around a tight corner. A two-lane road led in and out of town. The Department and the Community Emergency Response team, all volunteers, drilled for earthquakes when the S-curves on the roadway that hugged the mountainsides crumbled. Fire was the other deadly enemy. Chaos came next.
Holly could already see spirals of smoke eddying up from the trees, a thick stand of Jeffrey and piñion pines. Years of drought left the tips of many of the pine and oaks rusty orange against the healthy new growth.
“Holly, you keep out the looky-loos until the fire guys and the Forest Service get there. I'll coordinate from the office, start implementing the emergency plan just in case.”
“Hang onto your hat, Ed.”
"Our shooters, no doubt. Those two louts aren't going to be happy when they get home and find a deputy at their doorstep to arrest them for starting a forest fire."
"Especially when they have to pay the costs," Holly said, then signed off.
Memories of the Day Fire filled every mountain resident with dread. Smoke and ash had darkened the sky for weeks while the fire raged out of control. As Sierra Mountain Village lay in the National Forest, the Forest Service had taken charge, assisted by the three county firefighters and the paramedic based in Sierra Mountain Village. Scores, and then hundreds, of exhausted firefighters and emergency crew had flooded in to sleep on the floor of the Community Center next to the Town Hall.
Holly pulled off near the path to the clearing where the shooters had been. The roaring fire sounded like a train whipping through a tunnel at full speed, the air heating up. The white pickup was gone.
As she watched, flames shot up a dead piñion pine, setting it off into the sky like a rocket. She backed the vehicle five hundred yards down the hill away from the solid heat barrier of the fire, and got out as the local firefighters pulled around her. Three of them tumbled out of the truck, filling the air with radio crackle and running men. From the other side of the road a white SUV packed with kids coming down the mountain slowed to a stop to ogle the fire. The soccer mom driving leaned out the window.
Holly ran across the road to wave her on shouting, “Keep going, keep going! You'll just be in the way here.”
“What should I do? What about my neighbors?”
“Let the firefighters do their job. They know exactly what to do.”
“But—”
Holly slapped the side of the SUV, seeing the green U.S. Forest Service fire trucks already laboring up the steep hill.
“Get going. Wait at the community center. That's where they'll set up the Incident Command.”
“But all our stuff...The house…”
“You've got what's important here,” Holly said. “Your kids.”
One of the Forest Service firefighters slowed a moment from a dead run to yell, “We're lucky. The chopper was coming through back to the base and we rerouted it. Be here with a load of water momentarily.”
She clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Be safe.”
The roar of a chopper whap-whap-whapped overhead, the four-foot-wide bucket swaying back and forth. Because of the drought, the ponds on the municipal golf course were low, and along with great gouts of water dripping from the bucket were trails of green pond weeds. They were already dredging the bottom of the pond. Not good.
Once notifications went out, units from all the nearby stations would head out under the policy of mutual aid. The Forest Service would do everything in their power to knock this down quickly. In the next five minutes, hoses were already on the fire. The roar had died somewhat, but the heat still blistered her face.
Holly scuffed a heavy boot against the asphalt, rubbing her stinging eyes and looking at the radio as though she could make it talk. The residents who had seen the fire were on the move now, scared. A pickup filled with barking dogs sped past. Holly’s lungs felt as if she’d run a marathon behind a smoking diesel bus, yet maybe now the smoke wasn't quite as thick. The roar of the fire seemed to be quieting. It could still blaze up in an instant, ignited by a falling ember. She scanned the forest, watching for hotspots.
The chopper dropped down to the ponds on the golf course, then looped back again and again at five-minute intervals, soaring up the side of the mountain. Holly knew by the sizzle, the height of the flames, and thickness of the smoke that they were making progress.
A fire truck and its crew had arrived from the town eighteen miles away, then another from a station near the interstate. She waved at some of the incoming fire crew she knew from the Day Fire, memorable in California.
To the ignorant and the stupid, a forest fire was cheap entertainment. Cars and pickups sped up the mountain for an up-close look. Moving them on, she caught a lot of the usual abuse.
“Nazi bitch!” She was used to the taunt. Maybe it was the navy blue uniform, the heavy boots, the equipment belt around her waist. A lot of survivalist renegades lived up here. Any authority set them off. The radio crackled and she thumbed it on.
“Unit Four, what's happening?”
“The fire’s coming down, pretty much. Far as I can tell. ”
“That's what I pick up from the radio traffic. Station 48 has been called back already. Sheriff's deputy there yet?”
“I can see him coming up the hill now.”
“Come in then. I need you here."
∞
The parking lot by the golf course was already jam-packed, and more cars were arriving for the outdoor concert on the greens. Cars lined both sides of the road through the village center, curving all the way around the road that surrounded the town hall. Guys dressed for a good time were still arriving in wife-beater tank tops, shorts, straw hats, and flip-flops. Dads carrying coolers, moms and kids with strollers, geezers pushing through with golf carts, dogs frisking around, everybody heading to the concert on the golf course. Everybody wanted to get a good spot and pound down a few beers before the concert started at eight p.m. Newcomers streamed across the road, blocking traffic.
A lot of people didn't know about the fire yet, which was just as well. Holly parked the patrol vehicle in front of the community center next to the town hall.
A ten-year-old kid ran towards Holly. She recognized him as one of the latchkey kids who hung out after school in the games room at the community center. He had the hang-dog look of a kid who was always picked on. He pointed to the tiny lake in the curve of the golf cart path where the fairway met the rough.
“Um, my skateboard. The kids threw it in the pond again.”
The golf course lay behind the town hall and the community center. Huge stone boulders shaded by a stand of willow trees were an out-of-bounds sanctuary for kids to hide where they could make out, smoke cigarettes, and drink beer and whatever else. The restless crowds waiting on the greens for the concert to begin were five hundred yards away to the left.
“Jeremy, this is the third time we've fished it out for you.” Holly sighed. "I can't get it for you right now. There's too much going on.”
“It's just that I can see a hand, and like bare feet in the pond.”
“Oh, c'mon. What?”
“Yeah, one of the feet's got part of the leg attached, sticking out of the water.”
“Are you pullin' my chain?” She looked hard at him. Kids who played video games had a distorted sense about what was real. He shook his head. “Okay, show me.”
Holly looked overhead first to make sure the chopper wasn't on its way in to fill up again. This she had to see. Glancing at the side of the mountain where the fire had broken out, she didn’t see any flames now. Black smoke billowed up into the sky.
Jeremy ran ahead of her to skirt around the edge of the pond to the far side. The choppers had brought the level of the water down a good way, but even from the near side of the pond, Holly saw a bare foot with a length of hairy bare shin attached. The shin ended in splintered bone. As she approached the location, she saw another foot fallen on its side and sunk into the pond slime near the edge. A hand lay at the pond's edge next to the feet, the fingers curled in supplication, chopped off at the wrist, the bones splintered at the cut.
Discipline kept Holly rooted to the spot. This was a real human hand once attached to a real human body, sawed off and flung into the water near the edge of the pond. She shooed Jeremy behind her.
“See? See?” Jeremy said. His face was white and strained. The kid was used to being disbelieved.
Heart beating fast, Holly thumbed on the radio. "Unit Four to Unit One. Come in, Ed.”
“Unit One. Where are you? I need you. Over.”
“I'm at the upper pond,” Holly said, trying to keep her voice even. “You need to come down here right now. Come by yourself. Right now.”
There was a silence. Ed knew she didn't give him orders.
“Right now,” she repeated, her voice breaking.
∞
Even though the sun had sunk behind the frill of mountains long ago, it was still sweaty, clothes-stick-to-you hot. Holly waited for her boss, ready to turn away anybody coming near the scene. Adrenaline coursed thru her like rocket fuel, heart hammering like the pistons in a V-8 engine.
Daylight tinted brown by residual smoke from the fire darkened into the mauve shadows of evening. A high-spirited crowd from the bar at the community center had spilled out on the cool of the deck, which overlooked the golf course. The drinkers watching the mountainside were drifting back inside, disappointed because the forest fire show was over. The band had started and crowds were sitting on the greens, ready for a good time. Ronnie and the Angels was a cover band from Bakersfield. Long lines stretched raggedly out of the food and beverage tents. Little kids, making a nuisance of themselves, darted among the dancers on the wooden dance floor set on the greens three hundred yards away from the pond.
Ed came, walking fast.
“Jeremy, you stay here,” Holly barked at him. “You stay right on the boulders and don't you move one single inch.”
“Look, Ed." She pointed into the water at her feet.
He stopped and followed her gaze. “Aw, shit.” He sighed, ending on a shudder. He was already on the radio. Near retirement, trouble with the administration, and now this. “As much as I hate to, I'll have to notify the town manager after I call the sheriff.”
“That guy will just make things worse.”
He turned away to make the call. “Procedure. Keep everybody away.”
“I know that, Ed.” Holly would have liked to walk around the pond and take a look in the water to see where the rest of the body was, but she knew better than to disturb the scene. She became aware of sweat running down her sides under her heavy uniform shirt. This was one time that she wished she still smoked.
The band, wearing Hawaiian shirts, were pounding out, “Help, help me, Rhonda,” one of Holly's favorites. Every eye was fixed on the band and the dancers. For now, at least.
It was fully dark by the time the sheriff's deputy walked across the greens, accompanied by Ed Bradley. Holly's best friend Christy, a fellow officer, walked toward them like a teamster, with her serious face on. The Empty Suit known as the town manager was chatting away at Bradley, who was stone-faced. The town manager, Harvey Staley, gave Holly a cheery smile and a wave as though he was still glad-handing in the bar. He straightened to his full five feet six inches, sucked in his gut and adjusted his belt, ready for the cameras.
∞
“You touch anything?” Kern County Sheriff’s Deputy Hernandez said to Holly.
“No, sir. Nobody's been near it. You’ll want to talk to the kid who reported it, though.”
Deputy Hernandez hunkered down to talk to Jeremy, getting the basic facts quickly, ignoring Holly.
"You need to stay here for a while. Can you do that?" he said to Jeremy.
Big-eyed at all the attention, Jeremy nodded.
The town manager nattered away at Deputy Hernandez, who ignored him, talking into his collar mike. Holly recognized Hernandez because she'd backed him up on a domestic a few nights ago. He turned his back on Staley, left him still talking, and joined Holly and her boss.
"The coroner's death investigator is on his way. Guys from Homicide. I think it’s safe to say we got a homicide here. Paramedic's here already. This is one for the books," Hernandez said.
"I don't see the body. Do you?"
"Nah. We need to get a diver down there to find it, if it's there, organize a full search. But that's Homicide's call. Looks male, from the size of the feet. I'm going to take a look. The rest of you stay here.”
They watched as the deputy walked a few feet farther around the pond, carefully shining his Maglite down on the grass before taking each step, then squatted on his heels on the bank, a good way back from the feet sticking out of the water. His flashlight shone down into the dark pond.
“Can you see anything?" Bradley called.
Deputy Hernandez looked up. "Two feet, one hand. Nobody attached."
∞
Village residents listened to police band scanners as a way of being in on things in a sleepy little town. News of the discovery had already leaked. The fire seemed to be pretty much out, and when the excitement-starved heard the rumor of body parts found in the upper pond, a dozen or so drunken revelers abandoned the concert to have a look-see. Those, that is, who weren’t out howling at the full moon over at the competing bar in the village a quarter mile away.
Holly saw the town manager's wife, Arlene, talking fast and horning in to get to the tape she’d strung. Staley had married her four months ago out of the blue, bringing her to town, a stranger. His first wife had run off with the Amway rep. Arlene was now front and center everywhere, grabbing the spotlight, regarding herself as the First Lady of Sierra Mountain Village.
A cluster of curious scofflaws argued with Christy, trying to push past her at the tape to get a good look. "Dammit, Christy, I pay my taxes. I got a right to see what's going on,” one guy wearing a geezer golf shirt protested.
Christy faced them down, with arms crossed over her chest, one leg cocked to the side, the picture of pissy irritation, just waiting for somebody to snot off at her. Not a spark of malice in any of these old boys, all big talk. Most of them should be sent home with an application to the Get-a-Life-Club.
"What the fuck," one barfly said to the crowd. "I got a right to see what’s going on."
"Yeah," the second barfly said, and his pal agreed. "Yup."
The first barfly burped. The two of them stepped toward Christy and gave her the finger.
"Thank you very much, sir," she replied politely. "Now move back."
First barfly screamed, "Fuck you all over the place!" then turned and shoved his way back through the crowd.
"And the horse you rode in on," Christy muttered to Holly, the words sliding out of the side of her mouth.
They looked at each other and grinned. The rest of the pushing, shoving, falling-down crowd were strangers from Off the Hill, the term for anybody not living in the mountain communities. A forest fire and discovery of a dismembered body would be a great story to tell when they sobered up tomorrow—or the next day.
"Hope this doesn't mean I can't play golf tomorrow, Christy, my love,” said one of the golfers in yellow plaid pants and a red polo shirt.
“Don’t you my love me, Smitty,” Christy shot back.
“Hey you, lady, I drove seventy miles to get up here and the band’s lousy.”
“I don't hire the entertainment. Not my fault, sir. Please stand back,” Holly said, stepping forward and using her five-foot-ten-inches, once-a-cop, always-a-cop, crowd-control voice.
Holly kept an eye out, hoping she'd run into one of the good-looking firemen again. They couldn't all be married. Better than fending off the unwanted attentions of Pete Reynolds, the new guy patrol had just hired.
The town manager of Sierra Mountain Village lifted the police tape, and before anyone could stop him, walked around the pond to grip the deputy's hands tightly in a trust-me handshake, eyes wide open and sincere, welcoming him to SMV. Harvey Staley, he of the bad toupee, the belly, the toothpick legs, dripping sweat. Half the time you couldn’t find Staley when he was needed, and now he was there making sure he was part of the show. The deputy shrugged him off and ordered him to get behind the tape.
“Homicide on its way?” the paramedic said over his shoulder, catching Holly's eye.
Holly nodded and felt a giggle rise up in her throat and threaten to explode like cannon shot. Nerves. Just nerves.
The patrol officers stood talking amongst themselves, securing the scene with Deputy Hernandez and redoubling their effort to keep the crowd back until the coroner's guy and the detectives arrived from the County Sherriff’s station in Bakersfield. The big city was an hour and a half away by car over mountain roads.
A tall man in a dark suit carrying two heavy containers with a coffee cup clenched in his teeth shoved his way through the gathering crowd. He had the unmistakable authority of somebody who was going to amp up the show a few notches.
Professional Reviews
Review by James Lockhart 5-stars
Mar Preston's Payback is an attractive, skilfully done melding of an American police procedural story with an English village mystery. It is set in a village closely but not slavishly modeled on an actual settlement in the mountains at the dividing point between Southern and Central California. The beauty of the area and the remote tranquility of the settlement come through strongly and provide a good contrast with the sleazy, seamy side of human life there that naturally predominates in a crime story. The language is straightforward and natural, in both narrative and dialogue; the dialogue is perhaps slanted somewhat toward the rough conventions of language in mystery novels ever since Hammett and Chandler.
The story is told from a double perspective, not relying on the usual primary detective accompanied by a less acute subordinate. City-based county detective Dex Stafford is rather in the classic American mold of the big good-looking hard-boiled or at least undemonstrative detective. His opposite number is Holly Seabright, a member of the village's security patrol. The perspective shifts back and forth between the two, with about equal space and emphasis given to each person and each organization. The two investigators are at first antagonistic but eventually come together, which though it is inevitable gives the reader a sense of satisfaction when it finally happens.
It is notable that the author dispenses with the great old unfair trick of concealing from the reader what the main detective has already figured out but at crucial points withholds, not only from the the reader but even from his partner. Instead, excerpts from dialogue of the still unidentified perpetrators dot the book at intervals, at first mysterious but cumulatively telling us just about all we need to know as the picture gradually takes shape. A normally attentive reader can keep up with the police and even sometimes anticipate them, for, to the book's credit, they are people with no preternatural sleuthing gifts, in addition to having other things to do in their lives besides solving this particular mystery. It's a good way to proceed, for most readers profit more from sharing the experience of the investigators than from racking their brains over who did it.
The book is on very substantial paper and lies flat without too much trouble. The pages are inobtrusively designed, not drawing attention to the design itself but making reading easy with a simple arrangement in a classic, sizable font. Compared to many productions, there is even a subtle sense of lavishness, especially in having all chapters begin on a recto page in the grand old manner, which involves leaving many pages empty and removes any flavor of hurry or crowding.
Jackstone 5-stars
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