This is probably one of the most affecting intersecting with mental health in a while. It nicely counterpoints the assumptions garnered by Scorcher in the previous book too, just as the one before it did with Frank. French is great at humanizing characters and putting them into situations where their locker room parallels the investigation, which is what unwinds them in the particular mystery-homicide.

Scorcher has a mentally ill sister spiralling into a depressive state at the same time as catching a murder located at a small suburb where he and the family used to vacation. It also happens to be where his mentally ill mother took her own life. Since then Scorcher meticulously organizes everything in his life, which has served him fairly well on the squad-though not as always, as we learned in the previous book. His proclivity to a sort of Occam’s Razor approach makes him bull headed when the facts line up. As a counterpoint to that, he’s only now worked his way back to duty due to the embarrassment of the last book. And he’s got a rookie to train up, fresh and new.

And, indeed they do see things differently on this one. A particular gruesome quadruple homicide with conflicting evidence. And as he pulls at the seams of the case, that wool cap over his eyes, blinding him to certain things in his own past also begins to unwind.

This took a bit longer to get rolling for me, but still would have been a five star read, especially because of the chapter of a particular confession/interrogation, which was really well done. But it’s the first one where there’s an additional element that just feels contrived. I buy how it went down in the end, but not really how this contrivance is inserted - it feels too much like heavy-handed red-herring territory. One thing I always appreciated about French is even though you usually can see who the killer is, the book is always about something greater and the investigator has personal blinders on that take them a while to figure it out, so it never feels annoying that the case itself is easy to solve for the reader. French us about the character and theme, and usually subverting an aspect of the genre. This was the first time a genre trope made it and it did take away from it, for me. There were probably any number of ways to have that introduced and make it work too, or else it wouldn’t have felt so incongruous.

However, as mentioned, the hitting of stratification of class, poverty, disparity and mental health, and social stigma feel quite well done. I’m close to putting it at a 4.5 and rounding up, if only because the themes are hit so well and Scorcher’s revelation was gutting and excellent, probably more intricate than the others in some ways. Time will tell how I end up feeling, I guess.