Death Song (Kevin Kerney Novels)

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This is a splendidly written police procedural featuring Apache Sgt. Istee, recently acknowledged son of Santa Fe Police chief Kevin Kerney (featured in the previous 10 volumes of McGarrity's series). This story restores the series to the high plane it generally had before the Nothing But Trouble interlude. Glad to see that last one was a momentary lapse.

McGarrity warns us to watch for the details needed to solve a perplexing murder spree. An extraordinarily careful killer is systematically eliminating a police family, who seemingly had no secrets to hide or enemies to fear. It is fascinating to watch how the police investigators, forensic, crime scene, and drug teams manage to collect the "little details" from seemingly immaculately clean, pathologically perfect crimes. But which is the critical clue?

The plotting is taut, involving, the central series characters grow and develop. It rushes right along...until the final chapters, which felt anticlimactic after such a great buildup. OK, so it isn't the vast conspiracy we suspected, but this little perp? And in hindsight, the crimes weren't solved, simply because McGarrity arbitrarily holds study of the critical early clue to the very end. Still and all, I enjoyed the story and accurate settings much better than in the previous novel. I'm glad that is so, because this is the last case for Kevin Kerney as SFP Chief. Can it really be the last we see of him and his family--recovering slowly from traumas in earlier novels--as he retires now to London? Or does the focus now shift to Kevin's rediscovered son, Lt. Clayton Istee?

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