A great second book in the series…
As you can see from my review of the first book in Bruce Borgos’ Porter Beck series, The Bitter Past, I really (really) liked it, and that set an insanely high standard for the second book, Shades of Mercy. And Shades of Mercy came very close, and the thing that bumped it down just a teeny bit was not its fault at all, but my own idiosyncrasy. So I almost didn’t mention it, but in the end, I felt like it would give a more complete look at the book if I did.
First the good, and there’s lots of it! Just like A Bitter Past, Shades of Mercy is a compelling and somewhat unusual combination of spy story and mystery, even though (or perhaps because) one of the first dead bodies is not a human at all, but instead is an $80,000 prize bull. Even odder, that expensive cow was killed by a hacked military drone, which creates nasty worries about what – or who – might be next. And thus the wild ride begins. There are Chinese agents hanging around, worries about drugs moving through the sparsely populated Nevada desert, and a teen-age hacker, who may or may not have been connected to the drone. Sheriff Porter Beck’s background with military intelligence helps him navigate the government’s involvement, and some solid investigative work from his team helps too.
What I missed, though, were the historical ties to the Cold War and the Nevada Test Site, which had resonated with me so much in A Bitter Past, due to my own personal interests and experience. But, as I said at the start of this review, that’s not Shades of Mercy’s fault at all. In fact, many folks may prefer this second book, where the storytelling, without the dual-timeline thing of the first book, felt even tighter. In any case, if you like thrillers with a nice dash of mystery too, you’ll like both of these books.
I want to thank Minotaur Books and NetGalley for giving me a chance to read review copies of both books in this series, and I very much hope there will be a third to read someday soon.
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