Blood Foam

April 6, 2015
Shamus Award–winner DuBois’s serviceable ninth Lewis Cole mystery finds the retired Department of Defense research analyst back in Tyler Beach, N.H., living in the back of his Honda Pilot while awaiting the repair of his “half-burnt home,” which was damaged in 2014’s Fatal Harbor. A call for help from former girlfriend Paula Quinn, whose fiancé, local attorney Mark Spencer, has disappeared without a trace, forces Cole back into action—often violent, gruesome action. In the end, Cole must connect the dots between smalltown New England and a vengeance-seeking biker gang from Cheyenne, Wyo. While DuBois makes the story hang together, some readers will have a problem with Cole, who’s more of a contradictory collection of tropes than an actual believable character. For example, he possesses an old-school sense of honor, but he happily gets extralegal assistance from a rather charming mob boss. Still, series fans will enjoy the ride.

Starred review from May 1, 2015
Dubois' thrillers starring Lewis Cole can be picked up at any point in the series, but fans who have been reading them from the start will really appreciate how the characters keep getting back up after being tossed around by life. This ninth installment featuring Cole, a retired research analyst for the Department of Defense, shows him in a very vulnerable position: his historic New Hampshire home has been gutted by arson, he has run out of money, he is sleeping in his car, and all the while, a tropical storm is surging up the Atlantic coast. Enter his former lover and still good friend, a local newspaper writer, who seeks Cole's help in finding her fiance, a very steady-Eddie guy, a lawyer and town council member, who has unaccountably disappeared. Cole finds an ordinary but overlooked piece of data that cracks open the lawyer's previous life, but as Cole and his friend hunt for the fiance, they suddenly become the hunted. Dubois gives us scene upon scene of incredible tension, relieved by Cole's mordant wit and building to a truly gasp-inducing climax. This story arc started in the seventh Cole thriller, Deadly Cove (2011). The characters who were wounded and torn apart by violence in that novel are still coping with the aftereffects here. Dubois gives the reader both exquisite suspense and deeply realized characters.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)