It would have been easy for Will to give up on life especially considering a boatload of personal problems which add to his professional ones, but he has soldiered on managing to get the mayor of small town Haydenville, California, Bonnie Newman, to take him on as chief of police. Newman has her own ulterior motive. Haydenville has become a center for the clandestine manufacture of methamphetamine. Knowing Will’s narcotics background, Newman feels he is the right man for the job.

Of course, since Haydenville is a small town it also has small resources. Will has only one man working for him, Thomas Costello. Costello has had no experience in law enforcement, not even a correspondence course in police training. In addition the small town is peopled with residents that have lived there for many years and are not predisposed to help an outsider such as Will.

While the characters are complex and ones with whom one can identify, Will’s behavior, in particular, is inconsistent. At times he is capable of analyzing a situation and formulating an appropriate response, at other times one doubts his years of experience as a narcotics cop with such a prestigious organization as the LAPD.

He comes ill equipped to a crime scene with a barely working flashlight and does not act level headed when confronting a suspect. One of the other main protagonists is a writer named Frank Carver. Carver is a local favorite having written a book while he was in prison. He has given money to endow the public library because books have given him back his life. Or maybe not. The local librarian thinks he walks on water.

Another character, Mike Lopez is a park ranger. Initially he has no love lost for Will. However in the blink of an eye he apologizes to Will and vows his total cooperation. Such radical personality changes are hard to accept.

There are other inconsistencies in the story. The town, including the police department has limited resources. Yet they can send out pieces of duct tape for analysis to the FBI crime lab in Quantico. The mayor is convinced Will is the man for her problem yet she stands in his way when he tries to deal with it. Will himself is practically destitute, yet he comes up with twenty thousand dollars to finance a fake drug buy. The librarian shows Will a picture of Frank Carver which purportedly identifies him as an upstanding citizen yet she fails to identify the person in the photograph with Frank except by name. A librarian should have access to numerous data bases and could come up with the unidentified man’s elementary school if she knows her job.

The pacing is good and the story reads quickly as a thriller should, and I liked the author’s careful introduction of Will. His problems are only gradually introduced allowing the reader to get to know him. The book jacket does the author a disservice in this regard as it gives the reader too much information about the main protagonist. That being said, the characters need more consistent behavior. Will especially needs to develop more backbone if he wants to be a respectable series character. We can forgive him his inadequacies as a new boy on the scene, but he needs a few more admirable qualities to cut it as one of the really good guys.

--Andy Plonka