There's a strong similarity between everything Revell has been kind enough to send my way lately. They're all written by female authors with female lead characters and they're all part of series, this being the first in a new one for Patricia Bradley, called 'Pearl River'. I don't know if this grew out of one of her other Revell series or not but she has three of them ongoing, each with four books thus far—'Logan Point', 'Memphis Cold Case' and 'Natchez Trace Park Rangers'. It wouldn't shock me to find that all of them play with a similar template.

They're all thrillers at heart, clearly defined good guys vs. bad guys setups. The good guys all work in some form of law enforcement but a very polite law enforcement that's blissfully free of systemic bias and corruption. That means that they're the sort of upstanding men and women in blue that a reader of either gender would have no hesitation in taking home to see your grandma for apple pie and lemonade on the 4^th of July.

As such, they're all romances too, but polite romances that never reach what a modern audience is likely to see as a payoff because these authors are careful to avoid sex at any cost. Sure, these cops can hunt killers and shoot them dead when it's justified but they're not going to go past first base. It usually takes a lot of pages to get them that far, because there's always a Christian element that hopefully doesn't get intrusive. Revell is an evangelical publisher, so it's not surprising to find a lot of Christian characters in their books but the authors I've read thus far have mostly kept that from inappropriately affecting actual policework.

Not only are they written to a similar template but they're written in a similar style. They're all fast reads that unfold primarily chronologically in smooth, clean prose. They're easy books to read and easy books to like, even though flaws are often clear. Here, it's so clear who the bad guy is from the outset that it's less of a mystery and more of a romantic suspense drama in which we wonder when the very capable leads are going to see what's right in front of them.

And, of course, I mean the real bad guy behind the persona introduced in the very first word of the book. He or she, and the author's careful avoidance of any use of gender-based pronouns was clear and notable on the very first page, goes by Phame, some sort of master hacker who kills women of a certain description and leaves a chess piece with their corpses, but also factors the murders into some sort of game on the dark web that's racking in the bitcoin. It's also clear why Phame does this, as revenge for the death of someone called Phillip at the hands of "one police officer in particular".

It doesn't take us long to connect those dots. That one police officer is Alexis Stone, who's working vice in Chattanooga and physically resembles the victims so closely that she's tasked with acting as bait for the Queen's Gambit Killer. Phillip is Phillip Denton, a bomber she shot in self-defence when he raised a gun to her a few years earlier, even if it turned out to be unloaded. So Phame has Alexis in his or her sights and has an absolute blast toying with her life.

Alexis is a very capable officer but she's also very dedicated, waiting for a transfer to homicide and with the clear goal of becoming commissioner of the Chattanooga force. She has no life outside the job, a fact that hits home when she meets someone from her past in the bar. She has to pretend she doesn't know him when he bumps into her in a bar, because she's bait at this point and she's doing her job, but she ends the evening in his arms, because he wanted to check on her and found her just after she saves a waitress's life, shoots the Queen's Gambit Killer dead and collapses from a bullet to the lung for her troubles.

He's Nathan Landry, whom she dated in high school and clearly still feels a romantic connection to, one that she'll ignore because it doesn't factor into her ambitions. Landry is the chief of police in a small town called Pearl Springs and used to serve as deputy to Carson Stone, who's both the sheriff in Russell County and Alexis's grandfather. Yes, the plot conveniences are strong here, but he does have a reason to be in town and in the bar—he's picking up a note from his informant about a drugs case he's working back in Pearl Springs, because heroin is finding its way into the schools.

All these things are promptly thrown together. To recover from her perforated lung, Alexis is put on leave and she spends it at her grandparents' house in Pearl Springs, where Nathan isn't far away. In no time flat, Sheriff Grandpa suffers a heart attack and, because she's feeling a lot better, decides to appoint her his deputy sheriff, meaning she’s effectively the sheriff while he's out of commission. That puts Alexis and Nathan in collaboration on the drugs case and, because you just knew that the killer was not the man she shot, the Queen's Gambit Killer case too which has followed her to Pearl Springs.

The positive side is how easy all this is to read. Once you get past the early conveniences, this flows well and both Alexis and Nathan are highly likeable characters. Carson Stone is even more likeable as a curmudgeonly old gem, even if his wife gets annoyingly preachy at points. Perhaps just as well, the town of Pearl Springs is rather likeable too. I'm sure the author will explore and expand as this series runs on, but it feels like a pleasant place to visit already, full of character, and, however much it's likely to become rather dangerous as the series builds, it's easy to see how much of a draw it has for Alexis, countering her Chattanooga ambitions.

I'm not going to mention any of the other characters, partly because Patricia Bradley concentrated on her leads this time out in the origin story for the series, doing just enough with the rest for us to see how things are likely to go with future books, but also because the real identity of Phame is not hard to figure out and, as long as I avoid supporting characters, maybe you won't see through it just as a quickly as I did. I've probably said too much already, but then I'd argue that Bradley did that in the first chapter.

So this is a win for characters and for setting, both crucial for a first book in a series. It's a win right now for romance, though I don't know how Bradley is going to keep them chaste ongoing, and a win for suspense. It's only a fail for mystery, because it's crystal clear who the bad guy is, but I wasn't as fussed about that as I could have been, because the plotting is otherwise solid and it merely builds the suspense. I'd put this ahead of Fatal Code and Under Fire, but behind Critical Threat in ranking the Revell books I've read thus far.

The only other negative I'd throw out has nothing to do with Bradley but with Revell, because there is some really odd kerning set on this typeface, something most readers won't care about but that constantly had my eyebrows raising. It means that the apostrophes in words like "you'd" seem like accents because the gap between the last two letters is the same as between the first two. It must be a deliberate stylistic choice by the publisher, but I have no idea why. ~~ Hal C F Astell