Killer View (Walt Fleming)
by Ridley Pearson
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Book Reviews of Killer View (Walt Fleming)
Book Review: A Killer Book!
Summary: 5 Stars
My Review of KILLER VIEW by Ridley Pearson
Ridley Pearson brings back Sheriff Walt Fleming in his new suspenseful story, Killer View. With well developed, intriguing characters and a stunning setting in Sun Valley, Idaho, Pearson has readers unable to put this mystery down as its intricately woven plot keeps you captivated.
When the story opens, a skier is reported missing on Galena Summit in Sun Valley so Sheriff Fleming is immediately alerted. Fleming brings together his top-notch rescue team. Mark Aker, who is Walt's best friend, and his brother Randy, round up their tried and true team of search and rescue dogs. Dividing up the dogs, Mark and Walt take off one way, while Randy who has more experience heads out in another area. Suddenly, Walt and Mark hear what sounds like a shot and that ignites the story with one plot twist after another. They also can't get a hold of Randy, and it isn't long before they find him dead from what appears to be an accident, dropping off a cliff. Finding Randy, protected by his faithful dog, the sheriff notes there is no blood so he didn't die from a gunshot wound. Although, when Walt thinks about it, perhaps the shot was what drew Randy's attention away from where he was headed? If so, who fired that shot and why? Sadly, Walt lifts Randy's body to take him back as his brother Mark is devastated.
The next morning, Walt discovers that now Mark is missing. Sheriff Fleming first wonders if Mark just needed some time alone to grieve. But the search continues with intensity as Mark appears to also now be lost. However, Mark Aker's survival in a very remote area introduces another character for readers to ponder and decide what part of the puzzle he is involved with. The question of if Mark will escape keeps the readers on edge but all the while in an structured manner so you don't have to take notes to enjoy this fast paced flurry of activity on the snow filled mountains of Sun Valley.
Into what is becoming a multifaceted plot, comes Deputy Tommy Brandon, who is known to be sleeping with Walt's soon to be x-wife. Too good a deputy to be fired without charges of discrimination, Walt has this thrown in his face daily as he must work along side Tommy. Next in this picturesque setting, Walt discovers that mountain sheep are mysteriously dying, a local bottling plant contains contaminants causing workers to be hospitalized, and finally that a very powerful political figure may be involved in all of this. The sheriff begins to suspect that terrorism may even be playing a part of the picture.
With the help of his deputy and a photographer, the female love interest, the story's pacing amazingly allows the reader to be able to keep all the clues straight albeit not necessarily connected until the end. Will Mark be found? What part will Fiona, the photographer, play in the scheme of things and in Walt's life? Will Mark finally be saved and is there really a terrorist plot? These questions will keep the reader plowing through this snow filled mystery until the end to find out if Walt Fleming can assemble the pieces that frame the final picture in the Killer View!
Submitted: copyright by Karen Haney, August, 2008, published for Curled Up With a Good Book (www.curledup.com)
Book Review: " 'But we're the good guys.' "
Summary: 4 Stars
Ridley Pearson introduced Walt Fleming, the capable sheriff of Sun Valley, Idaho, in last year's KILLER WEEKEND, a thriller/whodunit about the attempted assassination of a woman attorney general planning a run for the White House. Now, this series continues with KILLER VIEW, another suspense novel with political buttresses.
Initially, Walt leads a search party for a missing skier. The foray to the unforgiving Drop on Galena Pass during a swirling snowstorm turns up no missing person but leaves one of the volunteers dead. At first, he's thought to have slipped and fallen. But Walt soon suspects murder. The sheriff's suspicions widen when Mark Aker, his friend, disappears.
Keeping the search for Mark on the front burner, Walt must also wrestle with evidence of mysterious, contagious animal deaths and possibly related human illness at a nearby water bottling plant. Then, during their investigations, Walt and Deputy Brandon register "hot" for radiation. Are all these developments related and might they be the key to finding his friend? He keeps returning to his and Mark's last, unfinished conversation, where his friend hinted at a larger scheme at work by saying, " 'We never talk...politics.' "
The reader also spends time with the kidnapper, first as a no-name who cold-bloodedly kidnaps a young woman. Later, name revealed, he deals with another captive. But the kidnapper's own obsessive mission leads him to seek his prisoner's cooperation which in turn leads to an attempted escape and to some of the most hair-raising scenes in KILLER VIEW.
Pearson pieces together a fast-paced tale from diverse elements, and while this adds a sense of disorientation (a little like being on a speeding merry-go-round), by the end, those pieces do fit smartly into the larger frame. However, the author is so busy packing in descriptions of Glitter Gulch (i.e., Sun Valley) and keeping his plot from running away with him and us, that many of the characters are pretty flimsy. Pearson also got some flak for thin characters in KILLER WEEKEND. Perhaps he believes that over the course of the entire series, he can slowly strengthen the recurring characters and that plot must drive the novels. However, more balance between characters and plot development would be enhance, not hobble, this series.
KILLER VIEW burrows into sensitive and ethically ambiguous political terrain. As he tries to make sense of all the clues, Walt never forgets Mark's comment about "politics." He must confront the unsettling, ever shifting Rubik's cube constructed from individual and governmental rights and responsibilities. He has to ask himself whether national security interests justify acts conceivably rivaling those of individuals and groups determined to expose governmental secrecy through violent means. As is almost universally true, everyone from every side thinks they are "the good guys?" Read KILLER VIEW and see if there are any "good guys."
Book Review: Formulaic; an unsuspenseful "thriller"
Summary: 3 Stars
In a sequel to last year's "Killer Weekend", Sun Valley Sheriff Walt Fleming is back, again juggling the mess of his personal life with his duties as a lawman.
Trying to solve the mystery of the disappearance of one of his best friends while also trying to solve the murder of that friend's brother, Fleming stumbles into a possible conspiracy with much broader implications and possible national ramifications.
It sounds better than it plays, unfortunately.
First, and most tediously, Fleming seems to be a very annoyingly passive-aggressive character who can't seem to get off the dime and make a decision about ANYTHING!
His wife's run off to shack up with his best deputy, abandoning him and their two young twin daughters. Fleming can't seem to decide how to deal with this in any way: fire the deputy? Fulfill his parental duties? File for divorce? Nada. Nothing happens, other than endless and boring angst and self-recriminations. He won't do or say anything much to the deputy; abandons his kids, essentially, to a caretaker; is afraid of his ex-wife; is too wussy to date anyone else.
We should care why?
As to the actual "mystery" itself, it's almost totally lost in the soap opera about Fleming's personal life and travel brochure descriptions of the Sun Valley area.
Yes, it's a beautiful place; I get it.
The characterizations of the secondary players range from thin and two-dimensional to virtually non-existent. Kira, the victim of a brutal rape in the opening segment, is a completely cartoonish character, for example; yet her rape is one of the driving events of the plot.
The "action" segments are strung together almost haphazardly. There's seldom a coherent flow to events, and some are completely skipped, only referred to in later dialogue in which you learn the outcome.
My three stars are generous, and are earned by Pearson's earlier works and the resultant goodwill from them.
Book Review: Atmospheric wilderness thriller
Summary: 5 Stars
Buried in an early snowstorm, the Sun Valley, Idaho, mountains play a major role in Ridley's second Sheriff Walt Fleming thriller. The story begins with a nighttime mountain search-and-rescue, and goes on to include snowbound cabin hideouts, isolated ranchers, buzzing snowmobiles, chases through the snow and among the peaks, and even a crucial and spectacular encounter with a hibernating bear.
Fleming's search for a missing skier fans out snowshoeing teams with dogs across the mountain, and includes one skier who crosses the slope from the top, Randy Aker. The operation culminates in Randy's murder and the next day his brother Mark, the sheriff's friend, goes missing.
The missing skier was a hoax, of course - someone targeted Randy - or Mark, as it seems he was the intended victim. This surmise is confirmed when veterinarian Mark's young assistant turns up at a hospital, brutally raped and beaten and so drugged she remembers nothing.
The reader has the advantage of Fleming here as Pearson has been cutting to the villain, John Coats, a mountain man and former meth addict who views himself as a hero on a patriotic mission. What this mission is, who is behind it, and why, remains a mystery for Fleming to solve.
Help in this comes from his top deputy and nemesis Tommy Brandon (who is living with Fleming's estranged wife) and an attractive photographer who provides a tentative new love interest while she pieces together crime scenes. Strange illnesses further complicate the puzzle as time begins running out for diabetic Mark Akers.
As the story accelerates, cutting from Fleming to Akers to Coats, the terrain and the weather continue to immerse the reader in Sun Valley's mixed milieu of money, independence and wilderness.
Pearson gives the reader a fast-paced, big story in big country with characters who continue to grow. Yes, there are one or two small holes in the plot, but the ride is well worth a couple of bumps.
Book Review: Not as good as the rest of the series
Summary: 3 Stars
Killer View is the second book in Ridley Pearson's series featuring Sheriff Walt Fleming of Sun Valley, Idaho. In this outing Walt has to contend with domestic terrorists, the kidnapping and rape of a young woman, the potential contamination of the water supply, and a missing persons case--all of which may be related to one another. At the same time he's got problems on the home front: emergencies at work keep him away from his twin daughters, and his soon-to-be-ex-wife is starting to think she wants the girls back. But much of the time Walt's most challenging adversary is the weather: early snowfall has made the remote areas in which much of the story takes place impossible to travel by car. There's a lot of trekking around on snowshoes in this book, and Walt sweats through more than one undershirt while climbing mountains and running from avalanches in freezing temperatures.
I've read and enjoyed the first and third books in Pearson's series. Unfortunately this second book was a bit of a disappointment. The principal villain is uninteresting, a madman--or close enough--who's motivated by ideology. It's never made very clear precisely what his cause is, so we don't get a great sense of what's at stake for him. The challenges Walt's up against are for the most part physical rather than cerebral. There are some parts of the book that go on too long and slow down the narrative--descriptions of guns or geography. Walt is beset by self doubt in this book more than in the others. It sometimes seems as if he's a character who's stepped in from a different series. And the book's climactic scene was over the top--the role played by a dead cow was like something out of Silence of the Lambs.
Happily, Pearson regained his mojo in book three, so I've high hopes for whatever he comes up with next.
-- Debra Hamel