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Jodi Compton's first book THE 37TH HOUR was one of the more intriguing debuts of last year, even if the ending did seem flawed. She's followed it up with SYMPATHY BETWEEN HUMANS, which takes us a little further into the bizarre world of Detective Sarah Pribek. If you haven't read THE 37TH HOUR, you might want to look away now, as it's almost impossible to review the latest book without strewing around spoilers to the first. When we left our royally screwed-up heroine, her husband Mike Shiloh had been sent to prison for the murder of a lowlife, Royce Stewart. But both Shiloh and Sarah are protecting the real killer -- Sarah's former colleague Genevieve, now living in Europe. Stewart had raped and murdered Genevieve's daughter Kamareia, but got off on a technicality. Sarah herself, though, is also a murder suspect, and in SYMPATHY BETWEEN HUMANS she's being pursued by Gray Diaz, a tenacious district attorney's investigator. Many of her colleagues seem to assume her guilt, and treat her as if she's done the world a favour by offing a scumbag. Although SYMPATHY BETWEEN HUMANS is technically a police procedural, there's not a great deal of procedure and actually not much police either. If I say maverick, you'll no doubt cotton on quick to what I mean. But fortunately for my nerves, which tend to twitch when they spot a genre cliche at 50 paces, Compton is a good enough writer to get away with it. Sarah spends most of the book out on her own dealing with a weird, dysfunctional family where a teenager has gone missing and where the writer father has had a stroke, leaving strange 17-year-old Marlinchen Hennessy in charge of her brothers. You may end up not entirely enamoured of Sarah or convinced by her actions. You're also expected to suspend disbelief at one key point in relation to the subplot which features a doctor working illegally in a housing project. The book takes a while to get going, but once I was beyond that disbelief point, I was totally hooked. I didn't much like Sarah, but Compton is a writer with bags of talent who can tie together seemingly disparate plot strands without blinking an eyelid. I strongly suspect there's a lot more to come from her quality pen in this series.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, February 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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