Dark Mire Kildevil Cove Murder Mysteries Book 2
Suspense/Police Procedural
DSP Publications
March 30, 2021
279
You never know what trouble will rise from the bog.
When the body of an unidentified woman is found in a Newfoundland bog, Inspector Danny Quirke must scramble his team of investigators to find her killer. But what initially seems like a straightforward case soon becomes mired in a tangled web of lies and deliberate obfuscation.
With the strange mutilation of the body—one eye gouged out completely—evidence seems to lead to a fringe religious group with bizarre beliefs. But while the pathologist indicates mushroom poisoning as the cause of death, Danny thinks circumstances point to something more sinister—especially when he begins to receive anonymous messages with links to horrific pictures of damaged human eyes.
Three more bodies join the first, with seemingly nothing to link them but a little girl in a yellow party dress who flits in and out of the mystery like a creature from the old legends. Then an old friend from his childhood reappears, and Danny is forced to confront uncomfortable truths about his own nearest and dearest.
On an island, everyone is a suspect….
Reviewed by Ulysses Dietz
Member of The Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
It was a dark and stormy night. At least, that’s the way it feels most of the time in this second of the Kildevil Cove series. J.S. Cook has crafted another moody, brooding murder mystery fraught with personal trauma and deeply-held secrets. Once more, the physical and climatic realities of Newfoundland infuse the narrative with a constant presence. As one character quips, “You don’t come here for the weather. You stay here in spite of the weather.” But the foreboding atmosphere is really just a metaphor for the all-too human darkness lurking just out of sight.
Inspector Deiniol Quirke is now running his own show at an RCMP substation covering the entire region where he grew up (that’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police). He is living in Kildevil Cove, but also nurturing his new relationship with Tadhg Heaney, the entrepreneurial lord of Eigus, the private island where Tadhg lives with his teenage daughter Lily.
Danny Quirke’s comfortable new life starts to go atilt when the body of a young woman turns up in a bog, grimly disfigured. This, as it happens, is but the first of a series of increasingly disturbing deaths that send shockwaves through the community. Danny has to juggle his private life with his suddenly over-busy job, complicated by the presence of a disruptive group of nomadic Pentecostal Christians known as the Harvesters.
All the good writing and plot construction I liked in Dark Water is here, with the added bonus that Cook has come to some sort of a comfortable balance with her characters. I didn’t have to struggle to like Danny Quirke in this book, now that his partnership with Tadhg Heaney is firmly established. Interestingly, Tadhg’s character becomes more secondary in this book, ceding place to the young police officers with whom Danny works, and another childhood friend who emerges from the past.
This complicated story is rich in secondary and tertiary players, who step onstage to confuse Inspector Quirke and muddy the proverbial waters. As with the first book, there is a slightly nightmarish quality to the entire narrative, made more so by the author’s choice to drop in chapters from different people’s viewpoints. While not confusing in the slightest, these added perspectives serve to ratchet up the tension in the unrolling of the plot. It’s a jittery tale, melancholic but, in the end, satisfying.
I liked that the book ends solidly, but leaves enough interest to encourage hopes for a third instalment. I hope she’s not done with Danny and Tadhg.