Eight stars
Kelley Armstrong has penned one of the great Canadian police procedural series that I have read over the past number of years. I have e devoured all seven novels and could not get enough. Those who have followed the series will know there has been a great deal of change, exacerbated by secrets and deceptions in small-town Yukon. Now, things take a significant turn and Armstrong’s characters must make a frightful decision to protect themselves as Rockton crumbles.
Life in Rockton is not always easy, as Detective Casey Duncan knows all too well. An isolated community in Canada’s Yukon Territory, Rockton is filled with thieves, cheats, and those who fled trouble back home. This collective of under two hundred is connected by their isolation and a close-knit community, but not everything is on the up and up.
While everyone’s secrets that brought them here are kept under lock and key, some people know, particularly the Council, who agree to admit people as they make their various applications. Now, someone has decided to leak secrets in a further attempt to splinter the community. Soon, it becomes apparent that Rockton is on the way to dissolution and the locals will have nowhere to go except back to the chaos they left behind.
As locals turn up murdered with their ‘crimes’ announced for all to see, Casey will have to protect the innocent and help those who could be in danger. Engaging the services of her boyfriend, Sheriff Eric Dalton, they try to trace down a murderer and work to create a cohesive core who will fight back against the end of Rockton in its current form. With a number of projects on the go, the murders continued and Casey will soon have to face the truth that Rockton may be on its way out, but someone wants its legacy be a chilling and spine-tingling event. Armstrong does well to tie off many of the threads here, but leaves some dangling and teases where things are headed.
Kelley Armstrong has shown herself to be a top-notch novelist who captures the reader’s attention with each book. This novel has been one of the best, building on the tensions that have mounted from the early chapters of the first piece, at least when Rockton came into the narrative. The story moves along and the momentum races as tensions mount. Armstrong uses this momentum to help shape her series so well and keeps the reader hooked as things disintegrate. The characters prove themselves worthy and their choices will surely shape how things will progress after this book.
The plot has always been key to this series and Armstrong makes sure there is massive movement with twists on every page. Rockton is surely about to implode in a way, but there is so much more to develop, leaving Armstrong to posit some major things about how things will go in a post-Rockton world. With a novella to bridge the gap and a few novels in a related series, I will be busy rushing to learn the secrets that Armstrong has been developing for the last few books.
Kudos, Madam Armstrong, for a great ending and planting seeds for the next beginning.
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