Review: Cops W ho Investigate Their Brothers...Are Crossing The Blue Rubicon
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 09 20, 2013
The story opens with a jump start. The main character,ex-Det, Sgt. Lincoln Munroe has little time to make decisions that may endanger his life,his career, and his family.  But his experience and intuition enable him to piece together the existing evidence at the scene which is enough to rule out an officer suicide. To Munroe it appears to be an Officer involved  Homicide case.Rather than turn the evidence over to  Internal Affairs ,he  begins his own investigation.The author is a career law enforcement officer which enables him to lay out  a plausible series of clues leading us to one suspect after another. Along the way he intertwined family life and 're-introduces characters from his first novel A DREAM OF DEATH.  Munroe' s wife has forgiven him for his indiscretion with his former partner Det.Kara and has befriended her welcoming  her help in this dangerous case.The one flaw common to many new authors is the temptation to write overly long descriptive passages that bring the action to a stand still and cause the reader to skip pages of text.In this case Author Drake gets carried away describing the families getaway trip to Warsaw, Poland. Way too many Polish words, and landmarks described. It  was almost as worrisome as the after dinner vacation slide show at the in-laws that causes you to miss the crucial season play-off games.NOTE: To writers, skip the tour guide and keep the story line moving.Overall,  even though the plot was formulaic; the characters were well developed, the dialogue was crisp and moved the action along,the scenes were described with just enough information to fill in our imagination and the ending was satisfying.The overly long description of the trip to Poland kept the rating  in the 4th Star rank.Rogershepherd