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Regulating Preventive Justice: Principle, Policy and Paradox

Tamara Tulich, Rebecca Ananian-Welsh, Simon Bronitt and Sarah Murray

(0 Ratings) Rate It

Book

Like medicine, law is replete with axioms of prevention. 'Prevention is better than cure' has a long...

Sacrifice (Detective Madison Knight Series Book 3)

Carolyn Arnold

8.0 (1 Ratings) Rate It

Book

Sometimes, justice comes at a high price… When a young man washes up on the shore of the...

fiction series crime mystery police procedural Carolyn Arnold

Mark @ Carstairs Considers (2099 KP) rated The Blessing Way (Leaphorn & Chee, #1) in Books

Nov 22, 2023

Interesting Debut

Anthropology professor Bergen McKee is going to spend the summer on the Navajo Reservation working on his book on witches in the Navajo culture. That means reconnecting with his college friend Joe Leaphorn, who is a Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant. Leaphorn is trying to track down a young man who is hiding on the reservation, and he uses taking McKee around to try to learn the man’s location. Then the young man turns up dead miles from here Leaphorn thought he was. Meanwhile, McKee finds danger he never imagined while conducting his research. Is everything connected?

I’d been interested in starting this series for a while, and I’m glad I finally did. It took a bit to get fully immersed in the book, especially since it didn’t unfold like I thought it would. McKee is more of the main character and the better developed of the two, although I did like Leaphorn and want to learn more about him. The plot also seemed a little disjointed at first, although it came into focus before too much time had passed. Once I did get invested, I was truly hooked with plenty of suspense to keep me interested. I enjoyed learning a bit more about Navajo culture. While definitely a cross between a police procedural and a thriller, it still doesn’t have much of the content I would associate with the genres. The book came out in 1970, so keep that in mind when you go to start it. I’m glad I finally started the series, and I’m looking forward to getting to know Leaphorn better as the series goes along.

Kudos

Phil Leader (619 KP) rated Grey Areas - The Saga (Books 1-4) in Books

Nov 14, 2019

Grey Areas - The Saga (Books 1-4)

Brad Carl | 2015 | Crime, Romance, Thriller

9.0

(1 Ratings)

Book Rating

The Grey Areas saga encompasses 4 books - each pretty long in themselves - which can be read separately or all in one go, as each follows directly from the last.

It tells the story of a mysterious stranger called Henry Field who arrives in the small town of Gable, Iowa clearly wanting to forget whatever has happened in his recent past. Attempting to lie low proves difficult as he first becomes feted as a hero on the local news, falls in love and manages to become a witness to a drugs deal gone sour.

There is so much in each of the books it is hard to express just how good they are. There is drama, romance, humour, crime, action and police procedural. It is as if Carl wanted to cover as much ground as possible and he doesn't put a foot wrong at any point. Each page leads inevitably to the next as the fallout from Fields' brief stay in Gable causes ripples that put many people in difficult positions, grey areas, where there is no clear black or white, right or wrong.

For such a long story there are of course a large number of characters but every one has been drawn with care and are all distinct, all have depth and all seem very real and very human. Throughout the whole saga there is a thread of realism; this might be fiction but there is no suspension of belief required, no particular heroes, no particular villains. Just people trying to do what they think is best, and sometimes regretting their decisions.

Want a summer read that will genuinely last all summer and leave you thinking about it for months afterwards? This series will definitely fit the bill