Down 'n Dirty Detectin' in D.C. (The Reflecting Pool REVIEW)

A police detective with a taste for bespoke suits, vintage watches, fine art, and classic European sports cars sounds like a conundrum, doesn’t it? Not easy to afford such high-ticket items on the average police salary. 

Nothing about Detective Marko Zorn is quite what you’d call “average”, though, in Otho Eskin’s debut crime thriller, The Reflecting Pool… and that fact makes for a highly-compelling read.


_______________
When a woman is found facedown in the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, Washington, D.C. homicide detective Marko Zorn has questions… not the least of which is how could an obviously fit female—in the prime of her life, by the look of her—manage to drown in less than two feet of water? 

Once the body has been identified as Sandra Wilcox, a Secret Service agent who’d been assigned to the First Lady’s detail, it seems that nearly every branch of the military, police, and government does its damnedest to shut down his investigation, leaving Marko with a larger question: what on earth did Ms. Wilcox get mixed up in, that has everyone scrambling so hard to keep the secret buried? Does it all boil down to politics… or was something else going on?

What no one fully appreciates about Marko, though, is the lengths he’s willing to go to, whether it’s solving a murder case in spite of what everyone is ordering (or downright threatening) him not to do… or funding his habit for luxurious possessions (mostly via a slew of decidedly-not-even-remotely-legal means, usually involving D.C.’s criminal underbelly). 

One thing is certain: by the time Marko wraps up his investigation, a whole lot of things will never be the same, again.
_______________

There’s quite a bit going on in The Reflecting Pool, from Marko’s investigation (including dealings with the White House, the FBI, and a zealous terrorist, among others), to his various side gigs (which eventually intersect in highly-satisfying ways), but Eskin manages to keep things humming along briskly and all the plots straight, with no confusion for the reader (beyond the initial few pages, at least, when the various pieces are first introduced).

I quite like that Eskin doles out bits of backstory gradually, rather than forcing the reader to wade through it all at once; this approach adds a little extra mystery to Marko and his relationships. (Is Marko a likable character? Not precisely… but nor is he unlikable, either. What he is, is a multi-layered, very smart, schemer… which makes for a very interesting and often insightful detective, indeed.)

As for those myriad plot points and spinning wheels? They come together nicely in the end, with a conclusion I only partially saw coming… always a good thing, in my book.

Eskin has a winner on his freshman outing with The Reflecting Pool… and you can bet I’ll be snagging up the next Marko Zorn book he writes.
~GlamKitty

Comments

Post a Comment

No ads or shilling, please. And always, always be polite.

Popular posts from this blog

Prowling the Streets in Search of Justice: A SuperHero is Born

Image
Growing up, I idolized Wonder Woman. She had it all--awesome strength and beauty, intelligence and kindness. To me, she was female perfection. Ever practical, I knew I’d never achieve that ideal (she was just fantasy, after all), but following her tireless quest to rid the world of evil and replace it with love and peace allowed me to envision a place and time in which women enjoyed real power and respect (and could fix problems without a lot of senseless bloodshed). It's never all about thrilling feats of derring-do, of course.  There’s a bit of melancholy attached to any superhero story too-- sometimes a sense of loss, and always feelings of loneliness. Nothing comes without a price.  Raymond Benson explores what it would be like to become an all-too-human superhero in his new book, The Black Stiletto . ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ ~ ✒ Martin Talbot is a just a regular Joe. Ordinary-looking, middle-aged, and divorced (with shared custody of an only daughter), he’s not the sort to inspire...
Read more

Werewolves in London? Try Bloodsuckers Down Under (Aussie urban fantasy/thriller REVIEW)

Image
Aside from a few dozen or so songs--the unremittingly-cheery sort of dreck I can only charitably term “uplifting”--there seems to be something of a universal consensus that life can be pretty awful. Sound overly harsh? Let’s look to some experts then, shall we? Consider that the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths is that “life means suffering”. Think back to John Hobbes, who concluded in his 1651 book Leviathan that life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. “ Of course, if you prefer your proof to be of the less-erudite variety, there’s always that late-20th-century classic, “Life sucks, and then you die”. (Lacks a bit in the eloquence department, but it gets the same point across, in inimical Bill-&-Ted fashion.) With such depressing thoughts bearing down on us like so many dark, angry stormclouds--and the fact that most of us have just seen too much bad to fall for the false promises in those sappy songs--it's no wonder a lot of people look for ways to escape t...
Read more

A Nightmare Without End: Abduction & the Long Road Back

Image
Danger takes many forms. Most of us--once we’ve become rather uncomfortably aware of our own mortality--make an effort to take at least a few precautions to ward ourselves from some of the dangers we face.  At a bare minimum, we look both ways before crossing the street. We inoculate ourselves against deadly diseases. We bolt our doors and lock our windows to all the scary things (and bad people) that go bump in the night. We fasten our seat belts before setting out on the roadways in our little hunks of metal (although statistics show that a lot more of us could stand to be doing that ). Taking such measures is empowering; we’re proactively doing something to safeguard ourselves. So many other things, of course, are completely outside the realm of our control. We’re unable to prevent cancers or illnesses that we’re genetically predisposed to getting. We’re at the whims of Mother Nature when it comes to floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and such. We can’t predict if a random stran...
Read more