Blown Away by Shane Gericke, a Mysterious Review.

Review: Blown Away, the debut police procedural thriller in a new series by Shane Gericke, gets high marks for action, but falls short on originality.

Rookie cop Emily Thompson finds herself the target of a psychopathic killer after (literally) stumbling across clues left for her to find, clues she and her fellow officers will need to decipher in order to identify him. Gericke, however, makes no effort to mask the identity of the killer to the reader, so Blown Away becomes more of a "whydunit" than a "whodunit".

There are several clever plot elements in Blown Away, the tautly written prologue is especially chilling, and some of the secondary characters are particularly interesting, but all of these are overshadowed by questionable lapses in logic as the plot unfolds and the depiction of a police force that at times seems unusually inept.

With Emily Thompson as a lead, Gericke has created a dynamic cast of characters that, together with more original plots, should serve him well in future books in this series.

Acknowledgment: Breakthrough Promotions provided a copy of Blown Away for this review.

Cut to the Bone
Pinnacle (Mass Market Paperback), June 2007
ISBN-13: 9780786018147; ISBN-10: 0786018143

Blown Away

An Emily Thompson Mystery by Shane Gericke