The Deep Dark Descending

July 17, 2017
In Edgar-finalist Eskens’s engrossing fourth Max Rupert mystery (after 2016’s The Heavens May Fall), the Minneapolis police detective has yet to recover from the death five years earlier of his wife, Jenni—struck by a hit-and-run driver, who was never identified, as she was leaving her administrative job at the Hennepin County Medical Center. Drinking too much and running afoul of his higher-ups, Rupert is close to losing his job, the only thing that gives his life meaning. Then D.A. Boady Sanden, a former friend, presents Rupert with evidence that Jenni’s death was no accident. When a case sends Rupert to Hennepin County Medical to interrogate a murder suspect, Rupert takes the opportunity to visit a coworker of Jenni’s, who sets him on a trail toward identifying his wife’s killer. In the end, Rupert must decide what he’s ready to do to obtain his goal: vengeance for Jenni. Eskens relies too heavily on coincidence, but a well-constructed plot and a sympathetic lead will keep readers turning the pages. Agent: Amy Cloughley, Kimberley Cameron Agency.

R.C. Bray is the perfect narrator for this dark story of grief and revenge. Homicide detective Max Rupert never believed his wife's death was an accident, and after four years of grieving, he received a recording of a phone call in which the speakers are planning her murder. The action alternates between the days immediately preceding this revelation and the present, in which the man behind her murder is now Rupert's prisoner. On a frozen lake on the Canadian border Rupert can decide his fate. Bray imbues the descriptions of Rupert's moral and physical struggle with tension, pain, and fatigue. Will Rupert be defeated by the cold before deciding to kill or exonerate his prisoner? Can he find redemption if he survives? C.A.T. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine