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DEAD RENEGADE
by Victoria Houston
Bleak House, November 2009
300 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 1606480618


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Doc Osborne is doing his daughter a favor, and he's not very happy about it. He's poking through Bart Nystrom's basement, looking for an old desk that Bart may or may not have sold. If Bart sold it, he never gave the money to Catherine Higgins, the widow of one of Doc's old friends. If he didn't sell it, and he says not, then it must be in his basement and go find it. Doc finds it, but not until he also finds a skull. Bart says it's the skull of a bear, and it might well be, except that bears generally do not have gold fillings and this skull does.

Doc is also upset because one of his grandchildren is very upset and won't say why; Doc remembers one of his daughters acting the same way after a sexual predator approached her when she was a child. Doc learns that a predator has just been released from prison and is back in Look Lake. Are the two incidents connected? And if they are, what is Doc to do?

Doc's love interest, Chief of Police Lew Ferris, has problems of her own, most definitely connected to Bobby Schradtke. Doc is more than happy to help Lew track down all the connections that implicate Bobby in all kinds of illegal activities. He's happy to spend any kind of time with Lew, even if it doesn't involve fishing.

Houston has written nine other books in the Loon Lake series. Fans of the series will enjoy RENEGADE; the characters and the setting are as good as any other entries in the series. Fans looking for something innovative and new in the plot department would be advised not to start with RENEGADE. It's pretty obvious from the get-go who the bad guy is, and not all that difficult to figure out the why and the wherefore. The denouement seems to come rather abruptly, and sometimes life does work that way. So: not the best book in the series, but certainly a solid entry by a writer who continues to produce well-written books about life in a small northern town.

Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, October 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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