Good to the Last Kiss

June 20, 2011
The Bay Strangler, a serial killer who breaks the necks of his female victims and adorns each with a tattoo, stymies crusty, opera-loving Vincente Gratelli, a San Francisco homicide inspector, in this middling crime novel from Tierney, best known for his Deets Shanahan PI series (Bullet Beach, etc.). When PI Julia Bateman is sexually assaulted and beaten at her country cabin, a "crudely carved rosebud" on her thigh leads Gratelli and his partner, Insp. Mickey McClellan, to suspect a link to the previous crimes, despite her assailant leaving her alive. As the murders become a local sensation, the two inspectors must also contend with their department's political response to the crisis. A digression as Bateman recuperates back home in Iowa slows things down a bit, but the author adds suspense by presenting the killer's perspective on events. The closing twist is likely to shock only genre newcomers.

August 1, 2011

Tierney (Bullet Beach, 2011, etc.) serves up a dark, twisty little gem in which a pair of embittered detectives and a not-quite-dead victim combine irresistibly.

Inspectors Gratelli and McClellan are grizzled, rumpled and, often enough, despairing members of SFPD Homicide. This is truer of pot-bellied, nicotine-stained McClellan than it is of quieter, tougher-grained Gratelli, who has somehow managed to craft a coping mechanism. Not so his partner, whose world view has grown almost insupportably bleak. "It's the survival of the sickest," he insists, commenting on their daily work product. Moreover, both are depressingly aware that their colleagues—those smartly dressed, brainy new men—think of them as has-beens. So when they're shunted aside, relegated to what seems a minor piece of a major investigation, they don't like it, but they're hardly surprised. A serial killer has been battening on the city's young women, beating, raping and murdering them, then marking each with his signature, a roughly carved flower. Julia Bateman, too, has been beaten, raped and marked, but not quite murdered. Comatose, she clings to life. Will she prove to be the serial killer's downfall? Certainly they don't come much braver than Julia. Or more dogged than Gratelli.

Every year the genre has its Goliaths, bigger and better ballyhooed than this modest entry. Come Edgar time, however, Tierney's well-written, tidily plotted, character-driven David of a book deserves to be remembered.

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