Book Review: Fires of Hate, DCI Greg Geldard Book 3, Heather Peck
Mystery: Fires of Hate, DCI Greg Geldard Book 3, Heather Peck
Blog Tour April 27, 2022
DCI Greg Geldard has been given divorce papers to sign. His ex-wife is eager for him to sign them. When he meets with her for what he assumes will be the last time, he sees the reason for her eagerness. She is pregnant.
After signing the papers, Geldard finds himself in an unexpected position. He is single and there are two women who have their attention focused on him. For someone who was long married and expected to be for life, this situation has a perfectly understandable and reasonable effect on this brave and intelligent police officer. That effect is complete and utter confusion.
One benefit(?) of being a police officer is that a major crime might come along to distract one from his personal issues. A car bomb goes off at a government laboratory. Several people are killed, many more are injured, and the clues indicate the high likelihood of this being an inside job. As the investigation proceeds, a second bomb goes off. This one was a boobie-trap at the site of the bomb’s construction and it very nearly kills one of Geldard’s officers.
I have become a huge fan of Heather Peck and her character DCI Geldard. Peck infuses her characters with charm and humanity. Greg Geldard is smart, determined, focused…and initially quite flummoxed at receiving the attention of two different women. His sergeant is equally smart, determined, and focused. She also likes to wear bold colors and tends to rush into dangerous situations before thinking. Those situations would include opening a door in a bomb-making site without waiting for the sniffer dog to check it out. Even the criminals are given this complexity: a young man gets recruited into a situation by an attractive girl and before he knows it he is in over his head.
Peck’s books do not have the outsider savant who shows the police how to do the job. They do not have the brilliant but quirky officer who ruffles everyone’s feathers but gets the job done. Instead they feature a smart and dedicated team who work well together, share a common mission, have mastered the basics, and keep working the job until something breaks. They are decent, mature adults who have decent, mature relationships with each other and with families. None of them are perfect, none of them are extraordinary. Some authors seem to feel that drama requires a brilliant but acerbic figure, a cop on the take, or some other unusual or corrupt character. Some of those authors need to read Heather Peck to discover how to find drama in the ordinary.
The Fires of Hate raises questions of sexism, racism, and mental trauma. Perhaps most intriguing are the questions of when an undercover operation slides into coercion or even criminal plotting. More than once Geldard and his team seem to be investigating other investigators. If a criminal plot is abetted by undercover officers who hope to catch them, where does the state change from investigator to co-conspirator?
Our thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Blog Tours for our copy of Fires of Hate, given in exchange for our honest review. The opinions here are solely those of Scintilla. For other perspectives on this book, check out the other bloggers participating in this tour.
Also see:
Book Review: Secret Places, Heather Peck
Book Review: Glass Arrows, DCI Greg Geldard Book 2, Heather Peck
Book Review: Fires of Hate, DCI Greg Geldard Book 3, Heather Peck