Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
A late night 911 call from a distressed young woman in an exclusive waterfront neighbourhood is the start of what looks like a missing persons case. Detective Casey Wray and her colleagues at Hampstead County PD fear that she may have been abducted and possibly killed, but with multiple potential suspects and a shortage of leads, the investigation is dead in the water. Then the first body appears, pitching Wray and her team into a complex web of secrets and exploitation in which people she trusted with her life could be implicated.
The first installment in a new series is often tricky, there is so much to be defined from the back story of the central character to the geography of the world he or she operates as well as telling story compelling enough to bring readers’ back next time. Rod Reynolds jumps this fence without so much as grazing a hoof, suggesting Casey Wray books may be featuring in the bestseller list next year.
Drawing on a real life and currently unsolved series of killings in Long Island Reynolds creates an all too realistic plot involving sexual exploitation and abuse of power. The setting in a beachside community where the gentrified seafront hides hard-scrabble poverty just inland is recognizable from coastal communities on both sides of the Atlantic.
In Casey Wray he has created a series character with an engaging mix of guts and vulnerability ably supported by a strong supporting cast. His prose style is crisp with the occasional touch of the poetic that lifts noir writing out of the pulps and, when done well, moves it towards literature; Reynolds does it brilliantly. If his second book is as good as this series opener awards, critical recognition and readers will flow towards him as surely as the tide comes to the shore.
