Review: Man With the Silver Cane (Inspector Locke Mystery #2) By: Christopher D. Williams
Amazon: https://tinyurl.com/y98ufyh8
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It’s no secret that mystery/crime fiction reads are my first love… they are the first genres I remember sneaking my mom’s books of… granted now, I realize that she left me these novels out, unlike her Harlequin Romance novels with the shirtless guys on the front. It’s with these novels she fostered my intellectual side, she wanted me to think, and decipher through information and not just get caught up in a love story.
Now onto why I enjoyed this book! At first when I dug into this novel. I thought it was going to be your basic vigilante story…which in this genre is pretty much a rinse and repeat sort of trope. I like the setup, but most authors play it safe. This author honestly blew me away with this story. It was fast paced, but so well crafted that at no point did I feel like anything was left out, or glossed over. Everything is important! If you are a reader who likes to skim through the story, and expect to get the whole thing at the end, this may not be the book for you. Because this author finely tunes each intricate detail to create a stunning novel. Nothing is a throwaway mention (there are a few red herring moments to where even I, as a seasoned reader in the genre fell right into…)
I am generally the type of reader who can figure out the twists and turns before we get there. I anticipate what is going to happen next. But the characters here definitely are not predictable, and that makes this story more relatable and life like. Because in reality, human behavior is not quite as predictable as we’d like to make it out to be.
Inspector Locke is a tour du force, he’s relatable, and modern. So we aren’t left with a hero who is better suited for the drawing rooms in gloomy London, but instead, a modern detective, who investigates every case to the fullest.
The cast of characters all have their unique backstory, and individual voices, so it’s not like we have a cast full of cardboard cutout secondary characters. Each is a small portion of the bigger picture, and without one part we wouldn’t have nearly as vibrant of a picture.
To me this is an artist to watch, an author who cares more about the craft and honoring the genre than churning out a rote novel just to make a buck.