Sometimes one comes across a novel that, without any especial innovation or reinvention, is so thoroughly entertaining that it transcends the well-worn tropes it contains. Tess Raynes’s CHILL OF TRUTH is such a book: a splendidly enthralling whodunit that revisits the usual murder-mystery themes without seeming staid or stale.
The set-up is simple. Elena Hart is a world-famous supermodel with a rags-to-riches story who is on the way to a polar-themed photoshoot in Churchill, Canada. She dies during the flight, and her chartered plane lands in the snowy town, complete with her retinue of mostly hangers-on: her astute yet slimy manager, her all-for-show boyfriend, a disinterested photographer—all of whom are murder suspects. Raynes follows the usual genre conventions of sketching in the details of their lives in just enough detail for the audience to get a read on their status, reserving only a little more time for detective Ethan Steele and forensic scientist Emily Carter: the practical-minded pair assigned to the case.
So far, so predictable. But predictable works when carried off with elan, and this Raynes delivers. Her ace card is the novel’s faultless pacing, which never lags yet tarries on the internal thoughts of this or that character when it needs to before moving on again. The dialogue, too, is natural-sounding, and Raynes has a sufficient knowledge of forensics for the autopsy scenes to ring true. The twists in the plot—the revealing of motives of a nicely varied sort—are beautifully worked in and keep the reader guessing, as any murder-mystery worth its salt should. The final quarter of the book is action-filled, tense, and offers a fitting denouement.
The only issue with the novel is the surprisingly large number of petty typos, usually in the way of missing or errant punctuation and quotation marks. They also include, for example, “ever” for “every,” “prosperity’s” for “posterity’s,” “know” for “known,” and “Marsha” for “Marshal”—as well as the odd incorrect capitalization. But CHILL OF TRUTH works on every other level. One only hopes Raynes will return to Steele and Carter in the future; there is far too much going for this crime-solving pair not to.
Though offering no new takes on the murder-mystery genre, Tess Raynes’s CHILL OF TRUTH is a splendidly entertaining whodunit set in Canada’s polar north.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader