Dark Water Kildevil Cove Murder Mysteries Book 1
LGBTQ Police Procedural/Suspense/Mystery
DSP Publications
March 30, 2021
301
They say trouble comes in threes. Detective Danny Quirke is already mourning his wife and mired in an internal investigation that will likely spell the end of his career. Now he must return to the Newfoundland fishing village of his youth to bury his abusive grandfather. At least his three are up. Right?
Then the bones of local boy Llewellyn Single, drowned thirty years before, wash up on the beach, and secrets Danny thought were buried forever rise violently to the surface. Only two people know what really happened: Danny Quirke and his former best friend, millionaire Tadhg Heaney.
Danny and Tadhg have been bitter enemies for years. But when Danny is accused of Llewellyn’s murder, he needs Tadhg’s help exposing the truth—before those who believe he is responsible get their revenge.
After all, on an island, nothing stays secret forever….
Previously published by Dreamspinner Press as Wind and Dark Water, March 2020.
Reviewed by Ulysses Dietz
Member of The Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
The first of a series of murder tales focused on a tiny fishing village on the coast of Newfoundland, “Dark Water” is a great set-piece of small-town noir mystery.
I don’t know Cook’s other books, but she surely knows her way around setting the tone and bringing on a vivid sense of place. Newfoundland is a northern island province, dominated by the realities of its landscape and weather. Cook brings that to bear throughout the increasingly dark story, as the seasons shift from fall to winter, and the secrets buried in the intricacies of the plot come to light. Just as Harper Fox infuses her Tyack & Frayne mysteries with the lyrical topography and climate of Cornwall, Cook uses Newfoundland’s brooding presence to shape both her characters and her action.
Deiniol (Danny) Quirke has come home to bury his grandfather, and to set about selling the house he grew up in with his grandparents after the death of his parents when he was small. His twin sister is in Portugal and uninterested in helping him. Still mourning the death of his female partner Alison, Danny has also suffered a career disaster while on a stint working in Dublin with the Irish police. Understandably, he’s in an emotional uproar, and running across his childhood friend-turned-enemy Tadhg Heaney (pronounced like the first three letters of tiger) doesn’t help.
Tadhg Heaney, a flashy entrepreneur, and possibly shady developer, is the scion of Kildevil Cove’s richest family, whose fortune is tied to a fishery. Best of friends until adolescence, Tadhg hasn’t spoken to Danny in thirty years. He lives in a splendid modern house on an island he owns offshore from Kildevil Cove, with his teenage daughter Lily—who is dying of cancer.
Well, there’s plenty of dark matter to work with Newfoundland’s gray, rainy, cold weather, isn’t there?
This is not a short book, and Cook fills every page with the sounds and sights of Kildevil Cove, the diverse crew of characters, and the increasingly disturbing secrets that begin to surface with the washed-up-bones of a long dead teenager.
It’s good. Very good. We get an intense look at both Tadhg and Danny, probing deep into the workings of their hearts. The great thing about this is that we see these men better than those around them—who, after all, supposedly know them. We have the inside track to what makes these complicated, almost-fifty-year-olds tick. Cook engages our sympathies, even as Tadhg and Danny grapple with past anger, present mistrust, and personal anxieties that kill their appetites and encourage their intake of expensive scotch.
The key to this book—and the reason it was assigned to me by the Paranormal Romance Guild—is the deeper relationship between Tadhg and Danny, a relationship that was stunted before it was allowed to go anywhere for reasons that are revealed late in the plot. Danny’s grief, Tadhg’s grief, and the poisonous biases and rumors of a small fishing town on a storm-swept coast all combine to create a surprisingly rough emotional journey.
My cavil with this first book in the series is that Cook gives us two men, nominally bisexual, who in fact seem to have lived largely heterosexual lives, but occasionally sleep with other men. We hear a lot about their interest in and intimacies with women—including cheating on them and, in Tadgh’s case, fathering a child. The male-oriented side of these men is mentioned only in passing, and neither of them expresses any sort of awareness of or alliance with a wider, 21st-century LGBTQ community. Indeed, Tadgh and Danny embody all the reasons that some gay men continue to distrust bisexual men (despite finger-pointing and shrill cries of bi-phobia!). Look, as a retired gay man with a bisexual husband of 45 years, I can hardly see either one of these men as allies or even as friends. This made it hard for me to identify with them or sympathize with them—until late in the book, when things finally begin to fall into place.
The final chapters in the book made me feel better about everything, and finally warm up to the “heroes” of the story. But I was reminded that many authors really don’t seem to have gay men in mind as readers. I have no interest in telling authors how to write or who to write for, but I don’t love remembering the decades of my life when there was literally nothing out there for me to read in which I could actually see my life reflected.
That said, I liked this book a lot, and have already started on the second in the series, Dark Mire.
LGBT/MYSTERY/THRILLER/PARANORMAL/FANTASY/URBAN FANTASY/HISTORICAL/WESTERN – SERIES
