Let’s see. Where to start. The family issue or the crime? Let's do family.
Alexa and Charlie Glock (‘like the gun’) grew up in North Carolina. As children, Alexa suffered some severe burns leaving scars still evident in adulthood. Went to college. He became an accountant, married, had two kids, now lives in Atlanta. She ended up becoming a forensic scientist with a special interest in teeth. Unmarried. Took in internship with the North Island Forensics Service Center in New Zealand and stayed when she was offered a job. She is in a relationship with Bruce, a senior detective based in Auckland. Charlie and his wife are recently separated. Brother and sister are not real close.
To strengthen their relationship, Charlie agrees to fly to New Zealand where they will take a popular multiday through hike (a ‘tramp’) in Fiordland National Park (on the South Island). Trampers can go it alone for primitive camping or they can sign up for a ‘luxe’ tramp, a guided trek where they’d sleep indoors and get prepared meals each day. They choose the primitive tramp, but quickly learn the two groups are interconnected.
Trampers take off at their leisure and arrive at cabin/campsites whenever they get there. Charlie and Alexa get separated leaving Alexa to fend for herself that first day. Weather and landslides are common issues and both further separate Alexa from Charlie. A rockslide obscures the track and Alexa must do some serious rock-hopping to traverse. As she concludes a successful traverse of the rock field, she rests in the forest, and something catches her forensic eye – a piece of bone. Curious to see if the bone in animal or human, she digs it from the earth and in doing so, finds more bones, and not just fragments. Whole ribs and some long bones. And the ribs look to have been damaged by a knife.
The local indigenous Maori feel that disturbing bones isn’t to be done, but she bags a couple fragments (what forensic scientist travels without their evidence bags?), marks the location, and plans to get them sent to her lab. While taking care of business, a helicopter buzzes her location even to the point of dropping a sack full of riff rock near where she is working. Intentional or trying to stabilize the landslide?
She reaches the luxe tramper destination and meets up with Charlie. The luxe host is counting heads and is one short. An Auckland orthopaedic surgeon who gifted her office staff with this adventure. A search is initiated. Charlie and Alexa find the doctor. Looks like she fell off a possibly defective rope bridge over a roaring creek. After some tense cliff challenges, the doctor’s body is pulled out. Alexa does a cursory exam and notices two holes in the doctor’s back, both about the size of the end of a trekking pole. The question is no longer did she fall, but was she pushed.
In one day of tramping, Alexa has stumbled into two potential murders. One fresh, the other a cold case. Once Alexa gets the bit, she returns to full-scale forensic mode. Local law enforcement is called, and a possible murder requires a senior detective and her current flame, DI Bruce Horne, is helicoptered in to manage the investigation into both crimes.
I chose this book for two reasons. First, the story is set in the wilderness, on a through hike, which I like to do. No place I’d rather be than in the forest. Second, the principles are from North Carolina, where I live (props to the author for her accurate NC geography). The story, once the investigations get going, is routine police procedural work. There are some hairy wilderness moments, some touchy helicopter encounters, and the attempts at mending the strained brother-sister relationship. Not to mention, the importance of her burn scars. The author is a former middle school reading specialist in Durham, NC who spent a year in NZ with her family. This book is the third of three (so far) Alexa Glock Forensics Mystery titles that are published by Poisoned Pen Press.
Available February 15, 2022.
No comments:
Post a Comment