One on One

June 4, 2018
At the start of Brandman’s smooth if superficial sequel to 2017’s Missing Persons, Deputy Sheriff Buddy Steele receives a call to go to a murder scene at the high school in Freedom, Calif., an upscale costal community just a couple of hours’ drive from L.A. For all intents and purposes, Buddy is the acting sheriff of San Remo County in place of his sheriff father, who has Lou Gehrig’s disease. Henry Carson, the popular assistant principal and coach of the Freedom High swim team, has been stabbed to death in his office. Buddy’s investigation takes him into murky waters, with sex games, bullying, and cover-ups bobbing to the surface. Meanwhile, he has to deal with a prolific graffiti artist who’s defacing property all over town. Buddy’s no-nonsense approach to crime solving gets results, but along the away some readers may lose patience with the repetitive dialogue. Brandman’s three Jesse Stone novels (Robert B. Parker’s Damned if You Do, etc.) were more satisfying.

June 1, 2018
Now that Buddy Steel, late of the LAPD, has come back to his hometown (Missing Persons, 2017), his second case takes him back to school.Officially, Buddy is the deputy sheriff of San Remo County. But everyone knows the real reason he's returned to Freedom, California, is to take care of his father, Sheriff Burton Steel Sr., who's been stricken with ALS, and to help the old man kill himself when life gets to be too tough to bear--a bargain Buddy's loath to keep. Fortunately, another fatality provides a welcome distraction: Hank Carson, assistant principal of Freedom High School, gets stabbed to death in his office. Who would have taken a steak knife to such a wonderful guy, an educator who principal Julia Peterson assures Buddy was doing a great job since arriving last year, a mentor who'd done his best to get close to every student in the school? Once Hank's widow, Kimber, hops on a plane to her parents' house in New Jersey before anyone from the sheriff's department can even sit down with her, she looks like the obvious suspect. But Buddy, who retrieves her and spirits her back to Freedom before you can say "red herring," can't believe she would have killed her husband or anybody else and reacts to her repeated come-ons with all the savvy of a blushing high school kid. Since Buddy's also faced with the case of a particularly self-promotional graffiti artist, it looks like Hank's murder will remain a mystery--unless of course he turns out to have been guarding a secret worth killing for, a secret so sordid that it makes three different suspects admit that they wish they'd been the ones who'd stuck in the knife.A modest, guileless, by-the-numbers whodunit with no more mysteries, twists, or surprises than the typical homecoming parade.

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