Pearson, Ridley: Killer View

  Amazon  

Killer View is the second book in Ridley Pearson's series featuring Sheriff Walt Fleming of Sun Valley, Idaho. In this outing Walt has to contend with domestic terrorists, the kidnapping and rape of a young woman, the potential contamination of the water supply, and a missing persons case--all of which may be related to one another. At the same time he's got problems on the home front: emergencies at work keep him away from his twin daughters, and his soon-to-be-ex-wife is starting to think she wants the girls back. But much of the time Walt's most challenging adversary is the weather: early snowfall has made the remote areas in which much of the story takes place impossible to travel by car. There's a lot of trekking around on snowshoes in this book, and Walt sweats through more than one undershirt while climbing mountains and running from avalanches in freezing temperatures.

I've read and enjoyed the first and third books in Pearson's series. (See my reviews: Killer Weekend, Killer Summer.) Unfortunately this second book was a bit of a disappointment. The principal villain is uninteresting, a madman--or close enough--who's motivated by ideology. It's never made very clear precisely what his cause is, so we don't get a great sense of what's at stake for him. The challenges Walt's up against are for the most part physical rather than cerebral. There are some parts of the book that go on too long and slow down the narrative--descriptions of guns or geography. Walt is beset by self doubt in this book more than in the others. It sometimes seems as if he's a character who's stepped in from a different series. And the book's climactic scene was over the top--the role played by a dead cow was like something out of Silence of the Lambs.

Happily, Pearson regained his mojo in book three, so I've high hopes for whatever he comes up with next.