Ali Karim was a Board Member of Bouchercon [The World Crime & Mystery Convention] and co-chaired programming for Bouchercon Raleigh, North Carolina in 2015. He is Assistant Editor of Shots eZine, British correspondent for The Rap Sheet and writes and reviews for many US magazines & Ezines.
Ames’ latest crime novel is a brutal, thought-provoking meditation on how fate can steer lives and the cost to those rolling the dice. Maria Cole is a LAPD cop, who [after a decade in uniform] is on her first assignment as a plainclothes detective. In a stakeout, she kills Felix Soto, a 17 year-old Mexican youth fleeing from a domestic burglary. She’s mentally unprepared for the toll the accidental shooting causes. The Internal Affairs investigation finds no procedural fault in her self-defence plea. But can Maria live with the consequences of her actions that resulted in the death of a youth?
On a month’s administrative leave, she wonders if she is really suited to being a police detective. But she has little time for soul-searching as she gets a call from a police chief in Fair Port, Alabama. Soon she’s headed by plane from Los Angeles CA to Birmingham AL, as she’s been advised that her ex-convict father, William ‘Billy’ Cole was found murdered outside his house. It seems the murderer, a fellow member of the local Alcoholics Anonymous group has been apprehended – a black youth named Dray Forrest.
The past life Maria Cole has buried, returns as she is forced to revisit her relationship with her estranged father, a troubled man who spent over twenty years locked in Raiford Penitentiary. On his release, he had tried to reach out to Maria, his only daughter – but she rebuffed his advances, and now it is too late for a reconciliation.
Though Maria’s police intuition indicates that Billy Cole’s murder was not a home burglary gone wrong. There are similarities to the death of the youth Felix Soto, a bullet wound that Maria inflicted back in Los Angeles – but there are also disparities that ring alarm bells.
It’s not long before Maria’s presence in small town Alabama becomes a thorn in the sides of some unpleasant people, and perhaps her father’s death could have been as a result of a wider danger that’s hidden in plain sight.
There is mirrored tragedy in the childhood of Maria Cole, and that of the incarceration of her father Billy Cole.
Not unlike Ames’ You Were Never Really There, this latest work is more a novella that can be easily read in a single sitting. It also shares the theme of haunted investigators having to become more brutal than their adversaries. Concise and judiciously edited, it hits with the power of shotgun blast to the face, raising questions of morality and its linkage to death and if retribution can ever be achieved or justified.
The memory of living through this narrative will remain in the mind of the reader like scar tissue.
Brilliant, but highly disturbing.
