Kathryn Dance is a CBI agent (the same guys as those in TV’s The Mentalist). She specialises in reading or recognising lies while interrogating suspects, but messes up an interview and a suspect walks away, having fooled her.
She is busted back to civilian duties and has to hand in her gun and badge. She is assigned the routine investigation of a fire for insurance at a roadhouse that led to a stampede and loss of life.
Dance suspects the fire was staged to cause a stampede and that somebody is using panicky crowd behaviour to cause mayhem and commit murder.
She has a relationship with a computer geek who has previously assisted her with a criminal investigation, but she doubts her feelings and the senior detective from the Monterey County Sheriff’s department is not making it any easier for her.
Her home life with her teenage children, who constantly text and appear to have emotional issues, intrudes as well.
The book is full of acronyms, abbreviations and internal politics, and the story is hijacked by these sub-plots at times.
The descriptions of Dance’s home life feel forced and some of the words use is awkward as Deaver leaps from adults to teenagers.
He intersperses dialogue with what is in the person’s head and this jumping to and fro is jarring at best.
This is not Deaver’s best effort as the storyline drags along at times and the secondary plots and storylines do not really add to the overall plot.
Solitude Creek: Fear Kills by Jeffery Deaver is published by Hodder and Stoughton