Happy Thursday, my lovely peeps🐥!
I'm slowly, but surely, returning to a normal reading and blogging schedule, so first up is Crime Scene by Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman!
Title: Crime Scene
Series: Clay Edison (Book 1)
Author: Jonathan Kellerman & Jesse Kellerman
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime
Length: 408 pages (Kindle; Libby)
Goodreads: [HERE]
Amazon: [HERE]
Natural causes or foul play? That's the question Clay Edison must answer each time he examines a body. Figuring out motives and chasing down suspects aren't part of his beat--not until a seemingly open-and-shut case proves to be more than meets his highly trained eye.
Eccentric, reclusive Walter Rennert lies cold at the bottom of his stairs. At first glance the scene looks straightforward: a once-respected psychology professor, done in by booze and a bad heart. But his daughter Tatiana insists that her father has been murdered, and she persuades Clay to take a closer look at the grim facts of Rennert's life.
What emerges is a history of scandal and violence, and an experiment gone horribly wrong that ended in the brutal murder of a coed. Walter Rennert, it appears, was a broken man--and maybe a marked one. And when Clay learns that a colleague of Rennert's died in a nearly identical manner, he begins to question everything in the official record.
All the while, his relationship with Tatiana is evolving into something forbidden. The closer they grow, the more determined he becomes to catch her father's killer--even if he has to overstep his bounds to do it.
The twisting trail Clay follows will lead him into the darkest corners of the human soul. It's his job to listen to the tales the dead tell. But this time, he's part of a story that makes his blood run cold.
If any of you have been to my blog before and saw my first Clay Edison review, you'll have known that I quite enjoyed reading The Burning, but that I had started the series backwards (book 4). It'd been a library book that I picked up on a whim and by the time I finished it, I was intrigued enough to come back and explore the first three books and for my recent read, I did just that, restarting the series, properly, from book 1 Crime Scene.
Deputy Clay Edison is with the Coroner's office, and he attends to the deceased, signing off on the final manner of death. Is it an accident? Natural death? Perhaps…homicide? In this book, Edison is called to the scene for the death of Walter Rennert, a once-respected and later disgraced psychology professor. On the surface level, this is a clear case of someone who has had a heart incident at the top of the stairs, has fallen, and met an unfortunate fate by the time they landed on the final rungs, exactly where Walter is when Clay comes in.
A natural death, as they call it. But Walter's daughter, Tatiana, insists that her father has been murdered. Is sure that he has been murdered, even if she wasn't on the scene when it happened. With a bit of persuasion and nudging some doubt into Clay's heart, he takes a closer look at Walter's history and finds a history of scandals and a failed experiment alongside the emergence of an eerily similar incident with the death of a colleague of Walters, enough to have the man on edge to the last of his days.
This was an enjoyable read. The beginning was a pretty good hook, but honestly I found the narrator's performance to be the highlight of the first part. Dennis Boutsikaris did a fantastic job adding the perfect dose of humor to the book, especially when voicing the dialogue of certain characters including a very unhappy man who keeps calling Edison about his "recently" deceased father. Still, once the story becomes more serious, the tone becomes more somber.
Somber though, I never really felt overly scared [for Edison] nor really felt immense thrills and shivers. There was a particularly creepy scene with what appeared to be the criminal appearing back at the scene, but nothing comes of it so this book felt more like a cozy whodunit, maybe a point or two tweaked higher into the thrill category. There were a few moments that I felt bored with and I felt more for The Burning than for this first book, but I enjoyed it enough to finish it ( as a serial DNF'er and mood reader, if you can get me to finish, that's an automatic good book) and of course, I got to know more of Edison too. It's the first book in the series, things only begin to get rolling you know?
For example, I never knew coroners are so involved into all this detective work. Sure, of course, Clay takes it up a notch, pushing boundaries, visiting and disturbing people that he shouldn't really, but it got me looking into the profession and sure enough, coroners do go around interviewing people. So, I guess I learned something from it all. But Clay? He is determined. Once doubt about nature vs murder sets into his heart, he will go through with it, delaying closing out the file as long as he can, to find the truth.
Overall, this was a good book and a good entry to the series. The characters were alright, although I didn't care much for Tatiana nor the romantic subplot between her and Clay. The plot was intriguing at first, but my interest somewhat tapered towards the middle, not particularly picking back up even at the climax. Still, I got to meet Clay properly for the "first" time, rather than start in the middle of the series and I really enjoyed the breaking-the-boundaries kind of deputy he is. I tend to be drawn towards mystery thrillers where law enforcement often break a rule or 10, whatever it takes to find justice, in this case, finding the truth. A good start and I look forward to the second book.
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