Review of "The Career Killer" by Ali Gunn

Author Ali Gunn brings us the first in her DCI Mabey series, with The Career Killer, a smart detective-mystery novel. Set in London, the main character works at London Yard, where her father wrote many of the training manuals. She may be her father's daughter, but her fellow detective would have preferred her father's son to be the heir apparent to his legacy.

Newly-minted Detective Chief Inspector Elsie Maybe takes her new promotion in stride until she inherits a wonky tribe of underlings and a murder at an old church. She's not fast to gather clues, not because she's moving at half-speed due to Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, but because the nature of the new string of murders has some ring of normalcy or familiarity to her, starting with a young woman in a wedding dress found in the ruins of an ancient London church.

She doesn't move like Columbo or Hercule Poirot, asking questions and sifting the carnage over in her mind. Instead, she seems to plot the next move of the killer without even admitting it to herself and uses her forensics acuity to find clues necessary to follow the killer who moves with speed and agility while being as elusive as a ghost.

The story takes us from Mabey sorting through her Murder Investigation Team 18 into the streets of London where the bodies keep popping up like tourist attractions across the countryside. At heart, DCI Mabey is a cop, first and foremost, born and bred. But she's still a woman, seeking what her victims seem to have been looking for.

The author gives some backstory on each case, the victims, and a chance to help solve the riddles, but ultimately this mystery story is tough to figure. And, our detective shows many facets of human life, struggle, and difficulty while maintaining dignity in a high-profile case. It's worth the read, but you won't finish the 446 pages in a weekend, although you may feel compelled to try.

Available now on Kindle Unlimited, the 99-cent price is quite nice for such a compelling text.

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Review of "The Deeper Dark" by Michael Allen

Michael Allen's The Deeper Dark is a military-political thriller with a haunting forecast of what could happen when our political system controls just a tiny bit more of our lives than it already does. Our story starts with a pilot's worst nightmare: being forced down over enemy lines. Then, like John McCain and other real-life wartime pilots, his nightmare comes into even scarier focus as he is met immediately by the opposition forces who are armed and most certainly dangerous. In Deeper , pilot Haven Kayd is taken to a dank and soon to be dark cell that has housed many other prisoners. The fact that he's the only one there is less than comforting. For months Kayd fights away the psychological fears his captors impose on him and manages to escape, only to find that his nightmare continues when he returns home to find his wife and daughter shocked to see him. They've been told he's dead. The message finally dawns on him: Fear the Deep State. Kayd asks questions a

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