VASQUEZ PRIVATE EYE

A former detective stumbles into a perplexing new investigation in Bardes’ mystery thriller.

It’s been seven years since Johnson Vasquez left the Cincinnati Police Force, cast as a pariah of the community after a catastrophic accident. Still struggling to recover from these traumatic events and desperately needing money to support his pregnant wife and three children, Vasquez accepts jobs working at the local bike shop, a pizza parlor, and at the bowling alley of one of his friends. But even as Vasquez focuses on these simple tasks, murder and conspiracy follow him wherever he goes; at each job, one of Vasquez’s new coworkers ends up dead following a fight with the boss. The bosses are adamant that the unusual deaths are suicides, but all evidence points to the contrary. Vasquez dusts off his sleuthing skills and discovers that Cincinnati has been plagued by other apparent workplace murders in which the accused swear that the victim’s wounds were self-inflicted, even when this seems impossible. What’s more, they all have one peculiar thing in common: each had been reading Vasquez’s own book about his experiences with injustice (“Although I had written out my account of the events of my bizarre case for the entire world to see, only a handful of people believed it to be true”). As Vasquez seeks the truth behind the strange murders, Bardes immerses readers in an intriguing mystery and introduces a wonderfully creepy villain. Unfortunately, the characters are difficult to connect with—the dialogue feels unrealistic, providing forced exposition and confusing explanations about Vasquez’s convoluted past, and no one seems to have appropriate reactions to shocking events. (A disturbing subplot involving Vasquez’s mother’s severed head only becomes increasingly off-putting as everyone treats the upsetting item like a banal piece of trash.) Bardes does offer plenty of grisly murders for horror fans, but the strange interactions slow down the pacing, keeping potential thrills to a minimum.

A gruesome thriller with intriguing ideas held back by flat characters and bizarre subplots.