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Third in Tricia Fields's small border town mysteries, WRECKED quickly provides enough back story to catch the new reader up with the relationship between Police Chief Josie Gray and the town of Artemis, Texas and that between her and her lover, accountant Dillon Reese. When he uncharacteristically does not show up to help her with one of her neighbors and does not even contact her, she is at first uneasy and then torn between concern and a phantom jealousy born of her own insecurity. The result is that she does a cursory check and then, rather than take the chance on discovering that he is unfaithful, simply goes home for the night. In the morning she is ashamed that she didn't at least drive by his home and his office so she checks both on her way to work.
And now the novel explodes into the terrific pace that it will hold until the end. At Reese's office Josie discovers his secretary murdered, the records ransacked, and the towers of both the secretary's and Dillon's computers gone. Calling the other officers of her three-person police force, Otto Podowski and Marta Cruz, Josie opens the floodgates of the local and state law agencies to help with the resolution of the murder and wisely hands over the position of lead investigator to Otto because of her involvement with Reese.
Now frantic with guilt that she might have prevented the secretary's death if she had driven by the office the night before and torn by fear for what connection Reese's absence might mean in connection to it, Josie sets about trying to assist with the gathering of information as effectively as she can while keeping herself from intruding on Otto's direction of the investigation which is particularly difficult because one of the avenues to explore is that Reese might be the murderer.
After a horrible day and no real leads, Josie comes home to a trashed house and the discovery of a cell phone left for her to find. On it are a picture of Reese with some kind of bag over his head standing between two masked men with guns, another picture of Reese holding up a ransom note demanding nine million dollars, and a message with instructions for wiring the money into an account. To make sure that she takes the ransom note seriously, it also demands fifty thousand dollars by 5:00 p.m. tomorrow or he will lose his arm.
I confess to being the kind of reviewer who spots and is annoyed by errors and I did spot some, but, honestly, I didn't care. This is a barnburner of a story and held my attention all the way through. The fact that it is also part of a series is just icing on the cake. I am hoping that Tricia Fields will work on the next episode with the same diligence as I will show in getting my order in for copies of the first two novels.
§ Diana Borse is retired from teaching English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and savoring the chance to read as much as she always wanted to.
Reviewed by Diana Borse, March 2014
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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