Steven F. Havill

This was another book I took a chance on… and I am glad I only picked up the one book by Steven F. Havill. I can't say that I found Scavengers interesting nor particularly good in any way. It was more of a stereotypical Southwest regional crime piece (the only thing missing was the Virgin of Guadalupe). The ending, say, the last 10% of the book, was a little better. But it was mostly one of those books that doesn't end soon enough, and being dull was not easy to speed through.

I thought it was weird to create a fictional place, and fill it with fictional characters; seems easy enough to use real places since the book does mention actual, real towns in that part of the country.

And the characters were all flat, cardboard cut-outs with little to no personality, and no vitality. They covered the standard range, and then did the general things they would be expected to do. Both the good guys and bad guys were eminently forgettable. The dialogues were perfunctory; nothing ever stood out.

At the end there was a singular element – the azote del espinos - that was new and different, but that is the only thing that was remotely different and I would give credit to being creative.… (more)

Given this is the latest in a long-running series, it's especially likely to be enjoyed by those who have followed along. I'm new to it, and at first the multiple characters (some of whom don't seem terribly integral to the story) were hard to sort out. But they are distinctively written enough that they became clear before long.

The police in Posadas County, New Mexico have a mystery on their hands: two dead bodies in and beside a truck along the highway. The one in the truck has been stabbed in the chest, the one who fell out of the passenger side has been shot. But not everything adds up, so the open-and-shut case stays open. It may have something to do with a crew laying barbed wire fences up the road, or maybe it's related to the astronomical site on the mesa. And there's something odd about an encounter between one of the deputies and the dead man, stopped earlier when his truck had trouble.

The mystery is nicely plotted, the setting is intriguing, and I enjoyed the characters. No wonder this series keeps plugging along.… (more)