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The Train Rider (Darian Richards, #3)

Tony Cavanaugh

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Jan 06, 2014 Shelleyrae at Book'd Out rated it really liked it

Shelves: arc-are, netgalley-reviews, aussie-author

In preparation for the release of The Train Rider, I finally had the excuse I needed to read Promise and Dead Girl Sing. I devoured both crime thrillers in a single day and eagerly began the third installment from Tony Cavanaugh featuring ex homicide detective Darian Richards.

Darian Richards was once Melbourne's top homicide cop but he walked away at the pinnacle of his career, retiring to the Queensland coast. It wasn't the bullet to the head that broke him, but his inability to capture the man
In preparation for the release of The Train Rider, I finally had the excuse I needed to read Promise and Dead Girl Sing. I devoured both crime thrillers in a single day and eagerly began the third installment from Tony Cavanaugh featuring ex homicide detective Darian Richards.

Darian Richards was once Melbourne's top homicide cop but he walked away at the pinnacle of his career, retiring to the Queensland coast. It wasn't the bullet to the head that broke him, but his inability to capture the man dubbed The Train Rider.

The first eight cases attributed the monster involved teenage girls abducted just after alighting a train, found days, sometimes weeks, later wandering the streets, dressed in the tattered clothes of the victim before them. They had been raped and tortured, but they were alive. But the ninth victim was never found, neither was the tenth, or the eleventh, or the twelfth...

In Promise and Dead Girl Sing, Darian reluctantly chose to come out of retirement, on his own terms, in order to stop a serial killer and a human trafficker respectively. In The Train Rider, young girls begin disappearing from the rail system. Richard's nemesis is in town and he wants to resume the cat and mouse game the pair began in Melbourne.

Darian is a paragon of machismo - brave, strong, smart and desirable with just enough pathos to invoke admiring, rather than pitying, sympathy. He is the man you would want on the case if your daughter went missing, cruising around town in his bright red 1964 Studebaker Champion Coupe with his rare Beretta 92 tucked into his belt, ably assisted by computer genius Isosceles. I probably shouldn't find him as appealing as I do, as in essence he is a vigilante, and yet I couldn't help but like him.

Cavanaugh presents a cynical view of policing where ego and politics makes a mockery of service. Corruption is rife, misogyny is rampant and law and justice rarely coincide. I know I should condemn Darian's penchant for operating well outside the law but frankly, sometimes the end justifies the means.

This series is characterised by chilling villains who prey on teenage girls. As a mother of two beautiful daughters I sometimes found it difficult to read the explicit torture visited on the victims. The ease with which the Train Rider is able to operate and elude police is terrifying and his end game is horrifying. I desperately wanted him, and those that enabled him, erased.

One flaw with the series is the depiction of the female characters, uniformly beautiful, bright and sensual. Rose, Darian's regular 'escort' turned girlfriend, is at least a decade younger than him, and looks even younger, 'Glamourcop' Maria uses her cleavage to dazzle Isosceles and the victims are all lithe and lissom young girls. In The Train Rider even the aged wife/lover/partner complicit in the killer's crimes is named Eve and insists she was once 'hot'.

By The Train Rider I was finding Maria a somewhat irritating character. Not only because of the repeated references to her looks but also because of her self righteousness. I do understand her moral and ethical struggle between Richard's particular brand of justice and her policing ideals, I just found I didn't much care after a while. The potential is there though to develop Maria into a strong and interesting character and I hope the author does.

The Train Rider is a gritty, dark and engrossing thriller. I had thought perhaps that this may have been the conclusion to Cavanaugh's series but it seems likely, given the ending, that we can expect more from books featuring Darian Richards. I hope so.
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Dec 23, 2016 Kathryn rated it liked it

Shelves: reading-list-2016, added-because-part-of-series, australian-authors, fiction

When I first started this series, I wasn’t sure whether I would continue since it was a bit grittier than the crime fiction I normally read. However this is the third in the series - I’ve been suckered in by the location of the stories - mostly the Sunshine Coast (the second was the Gold Coast and Stradbroke Island) - places that I am quite familiar with. I love the descriptions of the Noosa River - I have a location where I think Darian Richards’ house is (I’m probably wrong, but it certainly c When I first started this series, I wasn’t sure whether I would continue since it was a bit grittier than the crime fiction I normally read. However this is the third in the series - I’ve been suckered in by the location of the stories - mostly the Sunshine Coast (the second was the Gold Coast and Stradbroke Island) - places that I am quite familiar with. I love the descriptions of the Noosa River - I have a location where I think Darian Richards’ house is (I’m probably wrong, but it certainly can’t be too far from where I’m imagining it), and next time I’m staying up at Noosaville, I’m going to go to Ricky’s River Bar and Restaurant and have a cocktail!

These places are so familiar to me - although I didn’t realise that Nambour’s past was in sugar cane. "Even though I’d been living half an hour’s drive away for two years, I’d never been to Nambour. Of course I got lost on the way and drove in from the wrong direction on the journey from Noosa. The town is inland, across the Bruce Highway, nestled in a valley and surrounded by hinterland mountain ranges. It’s not the kind of place you need to go to unless you’re nostalgic for the sugar cane industry. Nambour was the heart and base of sugar cane; that was its reason for being, but the cane farms were dying out. Soon after I first arrived on the Sunshine Coast and reconnected with Casey he wanted to take me to Nambour and show me, like a proud local, the tramline that still funds down part of the main street. Back in the 1920s the trams carried the cane from the nearby farms through the centre of town to the railway line. I declined the offer. There was another local tourist attraction that Rose and I had just driven past: the Big Pineapple. Built in the early 1970s, this monstrosity - a sixteen-metre upright pretend pineapple on the side of the road - even won an award for the best Queensland tourist attraction." I've been to the Big Pineapple several times when I was little!

"She was waiting for me next to Noosa’s very own monument to size, the Big Pelican, an ugly structure with a massive beak that sat in the grounds of the foreshore which ran along the river about half a k down the road from my house. This was the family spot in the local area. Gas barbecues and kids’ playgrounds, a small beach that ran along the river’s edge, a two-storey floating restaurant, tininess for hire, houseboats for hire, kayaks for hire, outdoor cafes and restaurants on the other side of the road, nestled in between apartment hotels and clothes shops. From here you can see directly across the river to the mouth of the ocean and the distant horizon where the sky meets the water." And I have been in this park and seen the Pelican many times, I’ve been to the floating restaurant (the Boathouse - lovely sunset views!) and been to the cafes and restaurants across the street!

Like Cavanaugh’s other books, I’m a little conflicted - love, love, love the location descriptions, not so much the fairly graphic descriptions of the depraved depths of the perpetrator’s mind and actions. 3.5★ ...more

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Feb 22, 2014 Bree T rated it really liked it

Shelves: kindle-version, netgalley, arc, crime, series, australian, aussie-author-challenge-2014

For years, Darian Richards worked Homicide in Melbourne. He had the best strike rate solving cases of any detective in the country. He became head of the Homicide decision at an unprecedented young age. But there was one killer that got to him, snuck into Darian’s head and left him groping for the vodka to quell the nightmares. In his dreams he saw the victims and he chased the killer through trains but he never caught him. Just like in real life. Darian resigned from the Victorian Police Force For years, Darian Richards worked Homicide in Melbourne. He had the best strike rate solving cases of any detective in the country. He became head of the Homicide decision at an unprecedented young age. But there was one killer that got to him, snuck into Darian’s head and left him groping for the vodka to quell the nightmares. In his dreams he saw the victims and he chased the killer through trains but he never caught him. Just like in real life. Darian resigned from the Victorian Police Force and retreated to Noosa where he was mostly retired.

But now he’s back. The Train Rider has returned and this time, he’s in Queensland. Has he followed Darian? Has Darian’s retreat brought him out of hiding, using his expert method to kidnap young girls from trains but in a different state? Darian only needs to visit one home of a missing young girl to know the truth. It’s him. He’s here, on the Sunshine Coast and this time, Darian is going to find him. And he’s not going to sit around and wait for the justice system to deal with him. Darian doesn’t work that way.

But the Train Rider is clever. He’s been able to cover his tracks, conceal his identity and take girls from under the noses of the police for years – and it seems that now is no different, even in a much smaller area, one that’s less busy. When three girls go missing at once, Darian knows that he’s being taunted. He’s being given a choice – choose which one will die. But that’s not a choice Darian is going to make. He’s already picked his victim…

And so he is back. The Train Rider, who has haunted Darian Richards for a long time, has followed him to Queensland and begun working his old methods, making young girls vanish from the train. There are no witnesses, nothing shows up on CCTV, there’s no struggle. The young girls simply disappear. In the beginning, in Melbourne, he returned them. Sometimes a week later, sometimes two, sometimes three. Alive. But then, as Darian suspected would happen, the victims stopped returning. The Train Rider had other uses for them and Darian knows that each girl in Queensland will face this same fate as the unfortunate ones in Melbourne if he doesn’t find him and stop him soon.

Darian is smart, he’s a skilled investigator and he’s almost always able to get his man so this criminal is interesting because he manages to continue to outwit Darian at pretty much every turn. Darian only really manages to learn what the Train Rider wants him to learn, small clues that will further taunt Darian and allow him to do just a little…but not enough. Sometimes I wonder how long Darian’s luck will hold, administering his own brand of justice, not being afraid to dispatch violent and depraved criminals to the next world. A catch like the Train Rider, someone who installs fear and panic and the general population would be a huge coup for a police force…

I find this book – well actually this series, often focuses on really fascinating moral debates surrounding justice and punishment and what is the best way to deal with the sort of psychopaths that become the focus of investigations like the one into the Train Rider . Darian is one side of the argument, the side for the aforementioned dispatching. Often Maria, the local police officer who has become his reluctant ‘partner’ on several investigations, is the other. She’s the one still in the force, she’s young, she’s still very idealistic. She believes in “the system” – she proves this in Dead Girl Sing when she rats out Darian’s whereabouts to the local Gold Coast police. He doesn’t approve of her lack of loyalty to him there and the two of them in this volume provide two opposing sides of a justice argument. It’s interesting how often I kind of find myself kind of agreeing with Darian, especially when it comes to paroling useless pieces of trash who immediately and often violently reoffend. The Train Rider references several recent cases and you could easily throw up arguments for a quiet bullet for the likes of Adrian Bayley or Steven Hunter earlier on in their ‘careers’. Is it ‘right’? No. Because where do you draw the line? Who makes these decisions? What happens if you have a bunch of people all doling out their own versions of this? But could I understand people like Darian wanting to do it? Yes. I found that I really, really could. In this book, Maria begins to slide. The investigation begins to affect her, it begins to get under her skin. She begins to blur the lines, just like Darian has been blurring them (often smudging them right out) for years and she has to process her feelings about that. Maria is the most palatable for me in this book – she became more real as she questioned herself and her actions, her thought processes and her feelings from everything on her relationship to methods of interrogation. For once she is more than Barbie Cop, the pretty one.

Once again we are treated to the view of the serial killer, which is a regular feature in this series and once again, it’s pretty much creepy as hell. What was even creepier was the method by which he was kidnapping these girls. I think that we all like to think that we have a chance to get away from someone. To run, to scream, to do something. Even if we fail, there was a chance. These girls? They had no chance, no will, no real ability to do anything except what they were told. And that was truly one of the most disturbing things I’ve read. It made me squirm as I was reading it – I felt claustrophobic, even though I wasn’t confined at all.

The Train Rider is another fabulous installment of this series. Each one of these books I’ve been unable to put down and I hope this isn’t the end of the road. ...more

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Jul 14, 2014 Tonile Reads 📚 rated it it was amazing

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