Monday, March 24, 2025

Review: Dead Man's Trail

 by Donna Ball

I hate to say this, but I'm getting really bored with her Raine and Cisco mysteries.  It's sad--I love her writing and I've loved Raine and Cisco from the first book. But she seems to have fallen into a predictable rut of pointless violence and mass murder with almost a third of the book spent inside the killer's head. There is no cool and unusual trailing work that Cisco has to do; there is no complicated puzzle solving that Raine and her colleagues have to perform. It's just all action and adventure and not very adventurous at that.

Strange...I just read a description of the difference between a mystery and thriller. And by those criteria, this book is a thriller. Maybe I'm just into the wrong genre!

Spoiler alert follows

In this book she introduces an interesting character who has a serious issue with Raine and her dog. He seems to hate them both for no reason; he is clearly not stupid or simply prejudiced--there must be some deep and peculiar problem he has that Raine must understand and overcome....

And bang!  He's dead.

And so are a bunch of other people.  It's all just blood and gore, and since I skipped the parts inside the killer's head, I don't even know why he was doing it all. I expected to find out where Raine did, but I didn't. So, blah.

Very disappointing for such a great author and characters.

 

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