Serves You Right

 Serves You Right by Orion Gregory is the second novel by this author, the first that has been reviewed in this blog. The protagonist is Sydney Livingstone, a female rookie police detective in Walsh County, Ohio. She had been struggling with her tennis career and chose to leave that to join the police force, then at the age of 24. She walked into a situation in which it seemed that a number of bad guys were getting off too easy, or were hiring good attorneys who were able to get them declared not guilty. However, someone else was finding it unthinkable that such characters were not being sufficiently punished and took it upon themselves to bring their justice to the picture. A vigilante who called himself “The Enforcer” was at work, and the police department had to go after whoever that was. Suddenly, it looked like the vigilante might just be a cop, but who could it be?

 

Gregory created an excellent cast of very different characters. Livingstone seemed to keep making poor decisions and was close to being terminated from a job she desperately wanted to continue. Meanwhile, she continued in a relationship with a man who remained on the tennis tour, but her dedication to the job was threatening their relationship. The Police Commissioner Ed Lasek, Police Chief Delvin Pratt, Captain Wilma Griffin, Sergeant Stuart Montenegro, Detective Kevin Fosterno, Detective Tom Mitsoff, and others all had some obvious faults who could have been The Enforcer. It was near the end of the book that Livingstone made a Perry Mason like speech in a meeting of all the principal police people, addressing each of her fellows from the Commissioner, the Police Chief, and each of her fellow detectives about why it could be them, but then why she eliminated them one by one from being The Enforcer, until her choice was revealed. That was the point at which disbelief struck this reader. A bumbling rookie was supposed to have unraveled a case that none of the more senior officers could figure out.  I just found this suddenly astute rookie detective to not be a believable character. In the middle of her definitive speech I found myself wondering where this had come from.

 

I think this story has the possibility of being a good book, starting with an interesting protagonist. But, since when do rookie officers attain the rank of detective? On the one hand, her stumbling and bumbling attempts are good for misdirection to the reader, but for me, it was just too many signs of incompetence to go with the ending of the novel.