REVIEWED by Jay V.

TITLE: Wind and Dark Water

SERIES: Guernsey #1

AUTHOR: J.S. Cook

PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press

LENGTH: 310 pages

RELEASE DATE: March 24, 2020

BLURB:

Disgraced detective Deiniol “Danny” Quirke returns to Guernsey, the Newfoundland fishing village of his youth, to bury his abusive grandfather and dispose of the old man’s empty house. Devastated by the recent death of his beloved wife and mired in an internal police investigation that will likely spell the end of his career, he’s in no mood to reminisce about Auld Lang Syne with the people who made his childhood a living hell.

Secrets Danny thought were buried forever rise violently to the surface when the bones of local boy Llewellyn Single, drowned thirty years before, wash up on the beach. Only two people truly know what happened: Danny Quirke and his former best friend—now bitter enemy—millionaire Tadhg Heaney.

REVIEW:

Danny is trying to recover from some tough situations. He’s had a difficulty where he was assigned police work after the death of his wife and now he has returned to Canada just in time for his grandfather to have passed away.  He has to revisit his childhood town to figure out what to do with the property. This brings up many memories of his time growing up which is spurred on even more when he runs in to his former childhood best friend, Tadgh. Years apart through some tough patches, they fight against reconnecting but they keep circling around each other – and find that they things are not resolved. And when several events happen almost at once, including the washed up bones of a local boy from years ago, they both reminisce on their lives and try to fight being drawn to each other.

Set in a small town in Newfoundland, there is a good amount of atmosphere to be unsettling. And the read is a bit unsettling, too. I’m not always one that needs black and white but these characters are so grey – they can’t decide what they want, not sure they are that moral and they seem to get upset at the smallest comments. I wanted to like Danny and he starts out to be interesting, but the story begins to fall flat – he has a lot of flashbacks, but many times it leads nowhere. And Tadhg is this very wealthy man who doesn’t seem to have his life together and is supposed to be this ruthless real estate guy, but comes across as insecure and, frankly, a little weepy.

Inconsistency – that could be a central theme of this book. It wants to be a mystery novel but nothing ever really pays off.  All of the terrible things happen to them resolve in ways that aren’t satisfying nor really interesting.  Maybe we’ve been spoiled by books and movies that have mind-blowing reveals, but this is not one of them.  In the end, it becomes difficult to decide what this book wants to be – romance, mystery, high angst, police/detective and it never quite reaches the highs on any of these points.

There is, however, a lot of interesting use of language as the book’s setting brings a different native version of the English language and I had to read from the context a few times to understand words.  Not that books should be in American English, but it was intriguing to see the mix of the local dialect.

I don’t always think that small towns are boring, but this one does point to that.  I have hopes that the next adventure in the series will have a bit more excitement.

RATING:  

BUY LINK: 

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