Jason Dias's Blog - Posts Tagged "detective"

Blood on the Tracks by Barbara Nickless

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I picked up this book because Barb Nickless came to my book signing. Authors support each other. And I'd heard great things about Blood On The Tracks.

They were all true.

This is hard-boiled-detective style thriller, except the lead character (Syndey Rose Parnell) has a heart - and a dog. She's come back from the war with a wounded spirit and an adopted military dog. Her and Clyde both lost the same man over there; she lost a little more. Clyde IS her heart, the mission that keeps her going when the despair threatens to overtop her levies.

She's taken work as a railroad cop. The story centers around people who ride the rails, vets back from Afghanistan, and a murder that might involve all of them. The vic is family. Sydney's lost so much already that she'll do anything to find out who the killer is and get justice for the victim.

Clyde really does a lot for the story. We could throw in dogs all day long as devices to garner sympathy from the reader. But this dog, as such dogs do, is a way to explicate the inner workings of Syndey Rose that would otherwise go unremarked and unnoticed. Minus Clyde, she's nearly a sociopath like Jack Reacher. Clyde keeps her human, both in the plot and the reading of it. Dog or no dog, Syndey's as tough as they came, hard-boiled all the way.

Some unique settings and twink knowledge dwell with expert, moody prose. If you're read my reviews here, you know what I like is prose that borders on purple, writing that has character and emotion, almost poetry but also so smooth that it doesn't distract from the story. That's what we have here: every word carefully chosen to de exactly the job it needs to do.

There are others in the series. I read so slowly that I almost never consider sequels written by friends - I want to read everything from all my local writers. But here I think I'll make an exception. Nickless makes me look like the amateur I am.

That's not to say the story is completely without faults. There are a couple of tiny little issues that I was relieved to find because otherwise this book would have been so perfect there was no point in me every writing anything. Barbara Nickless wrote the perfect book, the rest of us should just quit. Luckily, I can still strive to be 10% as good as her.

Read this book immediately.



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