Death Song

November 26, 2007
McGarrity’s solid eighth police procedural to feature Santa Fe County, N.Mex., police chief Kevin Kerney (after 2005’s Nothing but Trouble
) opens on a deceptively quiet note as Sgt. Clayton Istee of the Lincoln County sheriff’s office breaks in the department’s newest member, Deputy Tim Riley. A short time later, after someone blasts Riley in the face with a shotgun, Istee and Kerney must dig into Riley’s past to identify possible murder suspects. The discovery of Riley’s wife, Denise, with her throat slashed in a horse trailer complicates the investigation: autopsies reveal that Denise was three months pregnant and that Riley had a vasectomy. The author does a good job describing the characters and the locale, but some readers may be disappointed that a mundane if realistic piece of evidence fingers the killer.

October 15, 2007
Like fellow New Mexican crime writer Steven Havill, McGarrity continues tomix the everyday dramas of domestic life with precisely rendered procedural action. This time Santa Fe police chief Kevin Kerney is preparing to retire and accompany his career army officer wife, Sarah, and his young son to Engand, where Sarah has been posted. But the slow winding-down of his career takes a jolt when a new deputy sheriff is murdered, forcing Kerney back in the investigative saddle. The case, which turns out to be a double homicide, brings Kerney together with his Mescalero Apache son, Sergeant Clayton Istee, prompting the kind of father-son bonding that has heretofore eluded them. McGarrity, a former deputy sheriff for Santa Fe County, writes convincingly about familial relationships, but his realforte is procedural detail: copsgetting the job done by paying attention and grinding it out. Theres plenty of that here, and in addition, McGarrity brings back some of thenoirish edge that distinguished Kerneys earlier outings. A solid effort from a reliable pro.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)