Posted: July 31,2020
A Desperate Place for Dying
This being the second novel I thoroughly enjoyed checking up on familiar characters from the first book like Zoe, Alex, Carmen, and, of course, Garrison. If you've read "The Gray and Guilty Sea" the sense of meeting up again with old, familiar friends is a great attraction of "A Desperate Place for Dying" - I even miss Mattie a bit.
Hands down my favorite place is the Horseshoe Mall and Alex Cortez's second-hand bookstore, Books and Oddities. I love the ambience of that place plus I haven't met a second-hand bookstore I didn't like. I wish Scott William Carter would go into more detail about the books that are available in the shop. In this novel there's mention of Louis La'mour, Nora Roberts, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", Winnie the Pooh, and Dr. Seuss. More please, I want more book discussions.
And more Alex Cortez, I love this ex-FBI agent turned bookseller slash part-time FBI consultant. In this book we meet his wife Eve and we get to stay in his home the Turret House, also a bed and breakfast.
There's also more of Zoe, who is chilling out a bit from her full-on goth girl act from the first novel. There's a lot of trauma here from what happened to her in the first story - both Mattie's death and her kidnapping by Nathan Hamlin. One gets a sense of her trying to hold up under all the pressure and Garrison, wonderful Garrison, doing everything in his power to help her keep it together. Our heroic detective is far from perfect at this, but watching Garrison fumble and course correct for Zoe is pretty heartwarming.
This is the novel when we might have to say goodbye to Carmen. It was pretty obvious from the first novel that she was overqualified as the one woman team of the Bugle. It is not surprising that she finally catches the eye of MSNBC.
As with the first novel, Scott William Carter's writing is clear and is finely balanced between maintaining a brisk pace while not stinting on the details. One thing I've always appreciated about the series was how Carter brings the Oregon coast weather, landscape, flora, and seascape to enrich the story.
This story is plotted tighter than the first one. Even though Gage covers more miles in his VW van here than in the first story, less time is spent on describing roadtrips and more time on incidents. The effect is that this novel seems to be more tightly packed.
The layering of the subplots gives this mystery novel its suspense aspect. While Gage is trying to solve the mysery of Angela's death, Bruzzi looms large in the background, always a potential threat that could strike anytime. Gage is under more pressure here than in the first novel - he also gets into a more dangerous physical fight here then he did in "The Gray and Guilty Sea".
The theme of this story concerns religion and atheism. We meet various levels of Christian fanatics as well as skeptics. I felt that Carter leaned towards the latter; which is fine with me because so do I.
Another theme here continues from the first story: Gage's return to being a private investigator. It started with "The Gray and Guilty Sea" but it is in the pages of "A Desperate Place for Dying" where Garrison realizes that detective work was not so much what he did but what he is. This is the book where Garrison makes a conscious decision to go back to being a private investigator.
The first novel, "The Gray and Guilty Sea", did not have a solid ending. I was hard put to understand how the Hamlins could engineer that particular situation at the end."A Desperate Place for Dying", on the other hand, has a better ending and leaves us with a bit of a mystery regarding Bruzzi's true intentions - which is just the perfect twist.