Take a tough, intelligent, competent woman and have her butt heads with a handsome, rugged, maverick detective, and you get what Sandra Brown does best in her newest release, “Blood Moon.” In addition to the usual ingredients that make us devour her novels quicker than a box of handmade Belgian chocolates, she adds a time element in this thrilling novel. Another murder will happen in four days if the killer is not found.
Detective John Bowie is still suffering from the guilt he felt when his department failed to catch the real killer of a young woman several years ago. Chrissy’s body was never found, and the accused teenager killed himself in custody after the deputies browbeat a confession out of him. That didn’t sit well with Bowie, who didn’t believe that the teenager was the killer, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. That is, until Beth Collins showed up in his small Louisiana town.
Beth Collins is a senior producer on a hot nighttime show called Crisis Point, and they spent a lot of time in Louisiana filming and interviewing people about that murder. They are set to air the show, but Beth has some questions and has uncovered some information she thinks points to a different killer. She thinks that Bowie, the irascible detective who complained that they closed the case prematurely, might be able to shed some light on things that don’t fit.
When they meet, sparks fly. But they have different goals, and Bowie is really a loose canon. He’s a heavy drinker, divorced, and his boss, Tom Barker, wants him gone, especially when Bowie and Beth start re-investigating the disappearance of Chrissy, who was presumed to be murdered by her friend and neighbor. It becomes really clear that Barker has things to hide, and he really wants Bowie out of his hair and out of his police force. Dead or alive.
Between the sparks and the development of Beth and Bowie’s characters, which takes up the first half of the book, Brown has a lot of murder investigating to work into the last half. And in the last 200-some pages, she does just that. In spades. We watch as Beth and Bowie go from no leads to connecting Chrissy’s disappearance to three other missing girls who also disappeared when there was a blood moon. Between Beth, Bowie, Bowie’s best friend and former partner Mitch, and some of his ties at the police station, they get some real leads. But the blood moon is only a few days away, and will they be able to stop what they think will happen then? Another young girl disappearing?
The action heats up in more ways than one as we fly through this hefty novel. There’s no flowery language, but that’s not why we read Sandra Brown; we want the thrills, the heat, the connections, and the suspense that she provides in plentiful proliferation. We don’t know how the two main characters, so different in almost every way, could possibly end up together. But we have faith in Sandra Brown, and we know that in addition to being a great murder mystery with some really surprising twists, it’s a romance. They have to live happily ever after. With the dog.
This review was first posted on Bookreporter.com.