“May you be in heaven half a full half hour before the devil knows you’re dead”
(Traditional Irish toast)
In this thriller, FBI partners Gus Wheeler and Vanessa Lambert travel to rural Maine to investigate the death of a teenage boy, whose shallow grave has been discovered by scavenging animals. His face is unrecognisable and, lying on his chest inside the rough pine coffin is a cross made of lead. He is eventually identified as Adam Carson. On arrival in Maine, the two agents, who might actually be on the young side to get the movie reference, realise that they are about to drive into what we older mortals might call ‘Deliverance Country’.
Fans of John Connolly’s superb Charlie Parker novels will be familiar with the forests of Maine, with its decaying cemeteries, isolated communities and memories of ancient evil. The author gives us little opportunity to draw breath. Adam Carson’s girlfriend has also gone missing, but neither her parents or their neighbours seem particularly bothered. Then, two more bodies are discovered. One is male, purely skeletal, and has been dead for some time. The second, a woman is equally unidentifiable, but for a different reason. Her corpse is charred beyond recognition, but the pathologist delivers a disturbing conclusion. She was standing while she burned.
If there was any lingering doubt in the minds of Wheeler and Lambert that they are – literally – in a dangerous place, their motel room is firebombed and they are lucky to escape with their lives. Stories of unspeakable deeds committed by religious zealots, using their faith as an excuse, are nothing new in crime fiction. An essential staple of such plots is the existence of a spiritually powerful central figure, revered but his or her congregation. The minister of the Slaves of the Secret Heart of Jesus is a forbidding character called Father Benedict, a former Jesuit now excommunicated by the Roman Catholic Church.
Few thriller writers can resist the trope of a bad guy hiding within the ranks of the good men and true. The trope works best when it comes as a complete surprise, with readers being given few if any clues, and so it is here. Authors with musical axes to grind can be mildly irritating. The late Peter Robinson’s Inspector Banks had a very individual CD collection and, of course, Morse was a music lover. Mark Billingham’s Tom Thorne’s almost perpetual depression was usually accompanied by the lonesome tenor of Hank Williams. Gus Wheeler, however is a jazz man, and a string bass player. He even takes a rather dismal fold-up bass with him on his assignments. In my (probably limited) view, jazz died with Bix Beiderbecke, and so I couldn’t connect to Wheeler’s obsession, but that didn’t ruin a good novel, which has a captivating blend of menace, human frailty and the power of landscape.
R. John Dingle lives and writes from a restored 200 year-old house, on a small island in Mid-Coast Maine. The often-haunting themes of the rocky coast, as well as a lifetime of experiences in and around New England’s small towns, farms, and cities, provide excellent inspiration for the tones and moods reflected in Dingle’s mysteries and psychological thrillers. The two previous novels in this series are Karma Never Sleeps and Wings of Madness. Before The Devil Knows will be published by Tule Publishing on 29th July
The book will be available from Tule Publishing from 29th July.
Central character Ronin Nash is a Scot who found himself in America, did a spell in the armed forces, and then worked as an FBI agent. When he is sidelined as a scapegoat in a kidnap case which went tragically wrong, he retreats to a lakeside log cabin hideaway, but is recruited by his former boss to join a new outfit, the Inter-agency Investigation Bureau. He is sent to the small town of Finchley in upstate New York to find out the investigate the discovery of three dead bodies in an abandoned mine just outside the town. 
We learn pretty quickly that something is not quite right in Finchley, but Nash spots this, and realises he is being played. He is smart enough to let the players assume he is ignorant of what is going on and the only question in his mind is just how many of the Sheriff’s Department – and other significant townsfolk – are in on the secret.
Atlee Pine has anger management issues, and A Minute To Midnight begins as she is put on gardening leave for kicking the you-know-what out of a child rapist. She decides to use this enforced leisure time in another attempt to find out what happened on the fateful night when her sister was abducted and she was left with a fractured skull. Accompanied by her admin assistant Carol Blum, she revisits the scene of the trauma, the modest town of Andersonville, Georgia. Tumbleweed is the word that first comes to mind about Andersonville, but it scrapes a living from tourists wishing to visit the remains of the Confederate prisoner of war camp which, in its mere fourteen months of existence, caged over thirty thousand Union prisoners of whom nearly thirteen thousand were to perish from wounds, disease and malnutrition.
A series of apparently motiveless murders in Andersonville diverts Pine from the search for her own personal truth, and she is soon enlisted to help the understaffed and under-resourced local cops. The first murder victims – a man and a woman – are killed elsewhere but then delivered to Andersonville bedecked as bride and groom respectively. When it turns out that they were both involved in the porn industry, what first appears to be a significant lead runs into a brick wall.
teph Maddox is something of an Alpha female. She has punched her way through the law enforcement glass ceiling during her training at the legendary Virginia military training base known as Quantico, and now she is a senior operative at the HQ of The Federal Bureau of Investigation which, as the organisation’s website tells us, helpfully, is:
For Agent Maddox, however, The FBI Experience is something other than a theme park visit. Gender equality has come at a price, and she is viewed with a certain degree of suspicion by many of her male colleagues, particularly as she is – and feel free to use the ‘woke’ description of your choice – a single mother, lone parent or head of a one-parent family. The blunt truth is that Steph has brought up Zachary largely on her own from day one. Not only that, but she has steadfastly refused to reveal the identity of his father.
aren Cleveland, to say the very least, knows of what she writes. She is a former CIA analyst herself, and her experience translates into a swiftly moving and convincing narrative. Steph Maddox is torn between fighting her son’s corner – he is innocent, surely? – and preventing a major terrorist assassination attempt. As in the real world of political and military intelligence gathering, nothing is what it seems, and no-one is above suspicion.
fullybooked2017 