High Speed, Low Drag

My Review Of Bruce Robert Coffins Latest Cop Mystery

If you like your cop-driven mysteries wicked fast and loaded up with lots of red herrings, hairpin curves and prime suspects, you’ll love the latest Detective Brock Justice mystery from Bruce Robert Coffin -- Bitter Fall.

There’s also a side order of score settling that’s particularly sweet for Justice. So sweet you might want to call it dessert since it’s the cherry on top of the book’s slam-bang finale.

Coffin, a cop’s cop now retired, is a helluva writer who knows how to tell a driven story. And he keeps the reader guessing by serving up a rotating gallery of suspects who fall under the dead-eyed stare of Justice and his fearless younger partner, Chloe Wright. They’re in relentless pursuit of the killer of Summer Randall, an athletic young woman beloved in the small northern Maine town of Greenville, the daughter of a powerful congresswoman and her estranged husband.

There’s the drunk driver of an SUV that smacked into Randall as she emerged from a wooded jogging trail, pursued by an unknown attacker; the war-ravaged poacher and survivalist living in a fortified compound deep in the forest; the violent, drug-addicted ex-boyfriend who once smacked her around; the philandering owner of the gym where Randall worked before suddenly quitting; and, the handsome doctor at the hospital where she also worked as a college requirement.

Plenty of suspicion to go around. Stirring the pot even more is Randall’s mother, the hard-charging, media hound congresswoman; her estranged but vengeance-minded husband; a boss-from-hell for Justice and Wright known as Penny Dreadful; and, a politicking senior state police desk weasel who wants Justice gone for good.

There’s a reason for this animosity. Justice testified against his partner in the bloody aftermath of a botched takedown of two hard-case brothers wanted for murder, a big breach of the blue code of silence that earned him instant notoriety and resentment in the insular world of law enforcement.

Cursed or blessed with an inflexible sense of right and wrong, Justice told jurors he watched from a second-story window as his fellow officer shot one of the brothers in cold blood just moments after Justice wounded the other one in a shoot-out that left the lawman with a concussion, a bullet in the leg and a limp he tries to hide.

No good deed goes unpunished. The jury acquitted the partner. Justice gets exiled to the wilds of northern Maine. And the partner? He’s now a deputy in the county where Summer Randall’s murder took place.

All of these elements make for a yeasty mix the author keeps bubbling, ladling a surprise ending you won’t see coming and that cherry-on-top dessert for a tough, lone-wolf cop who finds trust a scarce commodity he’s reluctant to give and has to work hard to regain.

Score another winner for the author. And get ready for the third book in this series, Dark Harbor, already waiting in the wings. He’s been a busy lad

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