Jeff Carson’s In the Ground is the 14th book in the David Wolf mystery thriller series and I have to tell you that I came into this series with this book and that was a problem for me. Both going into this story and coming out of this story there are a whole lot of connections to other episodes both in the past and to come in the future. There were lot of people who were only connected to this particular story because the protagonist knew them. I didn’t know them, and I wondered who they were and why they were there.
It’s a fascinating thing about characters in a series. Some authors manage to get the books to stand clearly on their own pages. Paul Doiron does that. Patrick O’Brien, Dudley Pope, and Dewey Lamdin do that in their sea stories. Elizabeth George does it well with Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley. Some authors don’t write their books in sequence but use the same characters like Agatha Christie with Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot.
But it is a challenge to write the books in series, having the character age as the pages and books turn, with the risk that a new reader (like me in this case) is going to walk into the middle of it. My wife has a big family, and the first time I walked into the room and they all looked at me, I knew that I was never going to remember who they all were and how they were connected. But that was okay, because I knew that I was going to have time to get to know them. They were family and that was a reason to care.
It takes a powerful writer to rope a new reader so tightly into a group like that and keep their interest. All the characters have to be memorable. All the characters have to be interesting. The risk is that all those characters are in the author’s head, and they may be in the heads of faithful readers as well, but as a newbie to this series, it didn’t work for me. And looking through the reviews on Goodreads, Jeff Carson certainly has a lot of loyal fans.
It’s a good story. Wolf is the sheriff of a county in Colorado and he gets called into a murder scene when a body appears on the top of a gigantic machine in a mining operation. Wolf has all sorts of issues with his job and the people around him, while he tries to sort out who did the deed and why. In the process, another body shows up. Added to the mix is a female deputy that Sheriff Wolf finds attractive despite some disparity in their ages.
I wouldn’t call this a ‘thriller’ in the ilk of Robert Ludlum, David Baldacci, or Ian Fleming. The scenery is great and the main characters do have substance, but I felt that the plot line took a back seat to the ongoing story of the characters. As in all good mystery stories, the why drives the who. In this story, Using a maze of clues in following the how, Carson does a good job of burying the why until close to the end in an explosion of revelation and gunfire.
Carson’s writing is solid and the editing is good. This might be a story line that would be worth turning back, and following from the beginning.
