Solitude Creek

Solitude Creek – by Jeffery Deaver

This is about the 25^th or 30^th book I’ve reviewed by Jeffery Deaver in the last seven years. It’s a bit unfair for me to make judgements about how familiar his characters and scenarios tend to be since many are ‘repeats’ from other books.  Why should anyone expect that much variety from the same author?  Many of Deaver’s books feature either criminologist Lincoln Rhyme or kinesics expert Kathrine Dance (this book is the latter).  After multitudes of books, we feel like we’re reading too much about the protagonists personal lives, over and over again, and not as much story as we would like.  Such traits are important, though, to the masses who haven’t read as much by the author, so I feel that it’s important to give the author a ‘pass’ where such things are concerned.

So a Katherine Dance novel.  Overall this is a very good one.  I think part of my enjoyment with this book is that the author doesn’t ‘overdo’ her kinesics experience as much as in other books.  Sure, it’s cool to read about such personal behaviors and how one can be tipped off by someone demonstrating such behaviors. But at times in the past, her gift seemed a bit too strong and contrived.  This really isn’t the case here.  This is a good ol’ fashion detective story with police, victims, suspects, crime scenes, and a heckuva twisted bad guy.

Solitude Creek is the name of a nightclub featuring live acts that can pack in several hundred patrons on a good night.  One night with the house is packed, a fire breaks out. People rush to the exits and some are trampled and killed.  An accident, right?  When Kathrine Dance shows up at the scene, she starts to slowly put pieces together that make things not as obvious as they first appear. So this starts her on her own investigation.

We do read a lot about her personal life.  She’s a widowed detective with two teenage-ish kids, and we tend to read a tad too many chapters where her family, along with friends and relatives are having group dinners and watching corny kids shows etc.  All of this is to show us that Dance is more ‘human’ (I guess) than your average run-of-the-mill police detective.  Usually I find that all of these diversions featuring her family and friends of the family simply get in the way of a good story.

There’s a couple of subplots going on here as well with various other good cops and bad cops.  As usual, there are several twists which are common to the Deaver forte.  This leads me to conclude that I enjoyed the book overall, and probably would have enjoyed it much more had I hadn’t read so much of Deaver’s work in the recent past.  No, it’s not a perfect book and one can find many flaws in a lot of different places, but I thought the read was solid and entertaining.  Not his best, but far from his worst.