Nine Elms by Robert Bryndza

Thomas & Mercer, 2019

ISBN: 978-1-542005-68-5

Availability: Hardcover,  paperback, Kindle edition, audiobook, audio CD

When it comes to reading choices, there are a LOT of crime thrillers featuring a female detective as the lead available, and many of them get turned into a series of books.  For a book to stand out from the competition, the story and writing has to be very good.  Robert Bryndza’s new book Nine Elms meets both of the criteria.  Excitement, good story development, solid characters, unexpected plot twists… all the elements are there.  It won’t be any surprise to see heroine Kate Marshall return for another go-around in a second book, and continue what looks to be a the start of yet another enjoyable series.

The book starts fifteen years prior, with a 26 page lead-in to the main story.  Kate is a detective, on the trail of a killer known as the Nine Elms Cannibal (although he doesn’t eat his victims, he simply takes a few bites out of each of them).  The author takes a nice swing at the media, when it’s revealed that despite the lack of actual cannibalism, the media hung the nickname on the killer in their never-ending quest for sensationalism.    Kate catches the killer and becomes a hero, but she quickly becomes the goat due to her relationship with the killer, and she resigns from the police force.

Jump ahead 15 years: Kate is a professor of criminology at a local college.  She receives a letter out of the blue from a family who found new evidence in the case of their daughter’s murder, which happened 20 years ago.  They want to hire her to look into it, since the police aren’t interested.  Kate and her academic assistant, Tristan, reluctantly agree.  Another string of grisly murders starts at the same time, and Kate sees similarities between the Nine Elms Cannibal killings, the new ones, and the cold case of the daughter.  Kate and Tristan are slowly but surely drawn into the fray.  It’s a race to track down the new killer, and find out how all three cases tie together.

Author Bryndza writes with a sure hand, like the seasoned literary veteran of detective writing he is.  No wasted words, no overdevelopment, and no slow parts: every chapter guns along at a fast clip and rolls right into the next chapter, guaranteed to keep you turning pages.  Of course, half the fun of these books is trying to guess the killer’s identity, and Bryndza does a good job keeping it hidden until close to the end.  It’s usually done one of two ways in crime thrillers: the killer was introduced as someone living behind a mask in the beginning, or he doesn’t make an actual appearance until partway through.  The author chooses the correct one here for maximum effect.  It helps that the story has three threads to work off of, as the original Nine Elms killer still does play a significant role throughout the book, and an important part in the climax.  For readers that always need the “why?” question answered as to the killer’s motives, Bryndza does provide enough explanation for both killers.  It’s not overly done, just enough to make sense and keep the story rolling.   His characters are also nicely done in shades of gray: they are not just one-dimensional, especially Kate.  She’s not perfect, and has her weaknesses like everyone else.

As Dabney Coleman famously said to Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond, “what’s the bottom line here…?” The bottom line for Nine Elms is, if you like crime thrillers, you don’t want to miss this one.  It isn’t quite up to the gold standard that Graham Masterton set for detective novels with his Katie Maguire series, but it’s a strong contender for the silver.  Recommended.

Contains: violence, profanity, mild gore

Reviewed by Murray Samuelson