Sorrow Bound (Detective Sergeant McAvoy)
*Starred Review* In the third DS Aector McAvoy novel (following Original Skin, 2013), Mark goes borderline operatic. Economically devastated Hull, England, is being boiled by a sunless siege of heat and humidity. It’s so extreme that residents begin to hope for thunderstorms that could inundate the flood-prone city. A new drug gang has routed its competition with nail guns and blowtorches and is showing that it has snitches in the police and influence in the courts. Despite the efforts of his “guv,” DI Trish Pharoah, to convince him of his worth, Aector is more riven by self-doubt than ever before. So, when a spectacularly brutal murder is quickly followed by two more, and Pharoah is pulled off the case by her superiors, Aector is on his own, hunting a deranged serial killer. This plot is stunningly convoluted, involving an outrage perpetrated a generation before that radiates outward like a tsunami caused by a mid-ocean earthquake. A separate plot involving the drug gang makes Aector’s wife, Roisin, a target. The inevitable thunderstorm approaches biblical intensity, and Mark leaves the fates of Hull, Aector, and Roisin in doubt. Each McAvoy novel has been dark, but Sorrow Bound goes beyond dark to near-apocalyptic. Mark pulls it off, though, and fans of the giant Scottish detective will lose sleep reading this one. --Thomas Gaughan