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Author Thomas Cook is a past Edgar winner and this novel demonstrates why. Although he has written a great many novels, in different genres, his sense of taste and his talent never desert. He doesn't write bad books. More to the point, he writes strong crime fiction that powerfully captures the imagination and compels the reader. Cook is certainly one of the best practitioners of crime fiction writing today. "Evidence of Blood," is on one level, a carefully drawn portrait of a small southern town, incomplete though that portrait may be. It is not the incompleteness that informs us but rather the twisted levels that are concealed beneath the placid normal-appearing surface, twists that are inevitably exacerbated by being exposed to clean air and bright light. This novel is a suspense thriller and Cook pushes the suspense to steadily higher levels as the book progresses, with almost no relief. Forty years ago a resident of Sequoyah, Georgia, a young high school girl, disappeared. Her body was never found. Another resident of the town, Charles Overton, was accused of her murder and on the strength of a lot of circumstantial evidence, convicted and executed for the crime. Forty years later, former resident of Sequoyah, successful true-crime writer, Jack Kinley, returns to town twice in one year for funerals, The first is for the beloved granny who raised him, the second to mourn his boyhood friend, Ray Tindall. Ray, an ex-sheriff, died suddenly of a heart attack while he was apparently investigating the forty-year old Overton case. The question of why Ray was found in the canyon, and why he was investigating Overton at all, begins to open tiny fissures in Kinley's understanding of his home town and the people in it. Inexorably he is drawn back into the town's fabric, its politics, and its old animosities when he follows Ray's trail and attempts to answer that long-standing question that Ray Tindall had come to personify: "It's better to know, don't you think? No matter what the cost?" A powerful, thoughtful, novel.
Reviewed by Carl Brookins, July 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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