WHEN THINGS FALL APART

Violence and tragedy stalk a rookie homicide detective in this police procedural.

“It was a good night to kill a lawyer.” So begins this terse and twisty novel full of dialogue and brisk exposition. Who needs exposition when even someone sitting and stewing at home reads like an action scene? Brenham moves readers quickly through scenes as Fort Worth, Texas, homicide detective Kit Hanover tackles her first murder case, partnered with unflappable and bigoted fellow investigator Wade Shepard. The mystery involves the aforementioned attorney, whose corpse is fished out of Marine Creek Lake. The cops’ relationship doesn’t start well, as Wade doesn’t like having a new partner and has sexist and anti-Native American tendencies; Kit was an adoptee from a Comanche reservation in Oklahoma. Kit sometimes ignores his comments, and other times returns his insults: “I figured you to be a Walmart greeter, not a detective,” she tells Wayne after he says that he “figured [her] for a school teacher on the reservation.” One can be forgiven, at first, for thinking the characters are stuck in a remake of The Enforcer (1976), with Wayne and Kit in the roles played by Clint Eastwood and Tyne Daly. However, after the obligatory rookie’s-first-autopsy scene, Kit is moved to the vice squad, and before the murder victim is identified, she’s walking the streets undercover. Brenham shifts gears so quietly that readers will only notice it in retrospect. The first indication of his storytelling prowess feels almost pedestrian, as he tells of a man in a pickup truck slowing down near the undercover Kit, and then hurriedly speeding away. Did he make her as a cop, or did he recognize her as Kit? After all, she thinks she’s seen him somewhere before. Aside from the first line, the book features few memorable sentences; fortunately, that line is enough to grab the reader, who may go back through the book after the first frenzied read to see how deftly the story is set in motion—and how the clues fit together before everything falls apart.

A knotty detective story from a skilled author.