Review of The Color of Blood by Keith Yocum
Published by the Kindle Press, 2016
The Color of Blood by Keith Yocum is the first in a series of Dennis Cunningham stories. The book opens with Dennis thinking about poetry while he is dying after getting shot. Then the story rolls back six months to when Dennis has just returned to the CIA Office of Inspector General after recuperating from his wife’s death. It’s clear that he hasn’t fully recuperated despite the best efforts of the agency’s psychiatrist.
He is assigned by his long time boss Marty to find an agent who has disappeared in Australia. Marty promotes it as a mundane task, just something to get Dennis started and back into the flow of things. It becomes anything but mundane as Dennis peels back the layers of what turns out to be an international, globe trotting intrigue.
It is a tangled tale much of which takes place in western Australia. Yocum demonstrates in depth understanding of the environments that he writes about from the Hilton Hotel in Perth to the Tyson Corner Center in Fairfax County, Virginia as well as the workings of spy agencies. He had me convinced that he knows of which he writes. It felt comfortable to ride along with him as he moved Dennis through all the different environments. Although personally I find long distance travel disturbs my thinking, and at times Dennis made these global hops without a care except for being bothered by the occasional turbulence.
There is a love interest with another character who is just divorced from a nasty guy. There is a family interest with Dennis’s daughter who is concerned about her father and they begin to repair that relationship. Yocum comfortably fits all the pieces of the plot together.
Yocum did a masterful job of exploring the psychological aspects of stress and trust which comes back around to how Dennis ended up on the floor in the opening scene. I am looking forward to reading the other Dennis Cunningham tales and exploring Keith Yocum’s other books.