What Burns Within
A Nolan, Hart, and Tain Mystery
Sandra Ruttan
Dorchester (Mass Market Paperback)
ISBN-10: 0-8439-6074-4 (0843960744)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8439-6074-7 (9780843960747)
Publication Date: May 2008
List Price: $7.99
Synopsis (from the publisher): One year ago, a brutal case almost destroyed three cops. Since then they’ve lost touch with one another, avoiding painful memories, content to go their own ways. Now Nolan is after a serial rapist. Hart is working on a string of arsons. And Tain has been assigned a series of child abductions, a case all too similar to that one. But when the body of one of the abduction victims is found at the site of one of the arsons, it starts to look like maybe these cases are connected after all …
Review:
Set in British Columbia’s Greater Vancouver District Tri-Cities
of Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam and Port Moody, Canadian author Sandra
Ruttan’s novel, What Burns Within,
provides an insider’s view of arson investigations and police
procedurals for child abduction, rape and murder. It’s a
spellbinding rapid-fire story of cops and firefighters pitted against a
religious psychopath who makes Alfred Hitchcock’s Norman Bates
look like a choirboy.
Ruttan’s novel is a series debut with intermittent flashbacks to
an earlier case that has left the three protagonists here, Craig Nolan,
Ashlyn Hart, and a First Nations cop known as Tain, recalling its
horrific details, musing about their individual traumas and replaying a
cover-up by one of them in order to protect the other two. Now
reunited, they’re facing the urgent and distasteful tasks of
solving a series of child abductions, arsons, rapes and murders while
simultaneously grappling with their feelings towards each other, a
father-son relationship, the actions of an unreliable partner, and the
bureaucracy of their local police and fire departments as well as the
finger-pointing politics between adjacent jurisdictions.
Told over a five-day span (Saturday to the following Wednesday), the
story begins with the blink-of-an-eyelash disappearance of a child and
the frantic search that follows. Then, there’s an arson with the
charred remains of a child’s body and an angel tacked outside,
”just like before.” Next, a rape is reported. And while the
investigations continue, threads painstakingly emerge linking the
crimes to each other and to investigations in nearby locations
involving other police forces with back and forth blame about missed
assignments. The characters evolve through their relationships to each
other, including a romantic attraction between two of them and a
definite dislike between another two who are forced to team up until
one of them is savagely raped and then begins to disrupt the
investigation. Sparks fly between senior police officers and between
them and their stubborn subordinates determined to find the kidnapper,
arsonist and murderer by doing whatever it takes, including the
occasional bending of rules and ignoring of laws. One volunteers to be
the bait in a life-and-death sting and another goes undercover in the
local fire station.
Throughout, the story’s suspense is paramount. Ruttan has a
masterful way of withholding details until just the right moment for
the maximum manipulation of tension. Readers are left guessing for most
of the book, for example, about the villain even though the
killer’s actions and motivations in stalking the victims are well
and frighteningly described throughout. Ruttan’s also adept at
planting suspects and even false crimes, and she knows how to plunge
fear into a reader’s heart. Particularly chilling are the
descriptions of three young female captives, starved and whipped into
submission and performing pseudo-religious rituals and chants as one is
being prepared for purification in a baptism by fire. The judicious
intercutting between scenes and characters also plays exceptionally
well for the accelerated pace of the story and to enhance the
reader’s interest as the novel races to its cathartic conclusion.
What Burns Within is
doubly rewarding. Once, as a first-class mystery to be read on its own.
And secondly as an exciting debut for a promising series from an
obviously talented writer who at age 13 had her first newspaper column
and now edits the online Spinetingler Magazine and has her own website
at www.sandraruttan.com.
Special thanks to M. Wayne Cunningham (mw_cunningham@telus.net) for contributing his review of What Burns Within and to for providing an ARC of the book for this review.
Review Copyright © 2009 — M. Wayne Cunningham — All Rights Reserved — Reprinted with Permission
Have you read What Burns Within? How would you rate it?
Mysteries in this series ...
What
Burns Within
Dorchester (Mass Market Paperback), May 2008
ISBN-10: 0-8439-6074-4 (0843960744)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8439-6074-7 (9780843960747)
The
Frailty of Flesh
Dorchester (Mass Market Paperback)
ISBN-10: 0-8439-6075-2 (0843960752)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8439-6075-4 (9780843960754)
Omnimystery keywords for What Burns Within
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Location(s) referenced: Vancouver,
British Columbia.
