Walking the Bones
Walking the Bones by Randall Silvis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Up front: I didn’t read the first in this series, as the library only had the second available.
This is always potentially confounding to a mystery fiction reader. How much of the back story do we need to know in order to submerge ourselves in the current tale?
There are many references to the first in series, but I never felt that I was missing any necessary puzzle piece. There was just enough exposition to put things in perspective without it feeling intrusive to the present day story.
DeMarco, the male lead, is a fully realized human being. With a past filled with trauma and tragedy. He is a police officer on leave, contemplating retirement. He accompanies his lover, Jayme, another police officer, on a road trip. She is on leave to–what? Keep an eye on him? Keep a rein on him? Hmmm…I’m not terribly fond of Jayme…more later in the review. They end up cutting their trip short when Jayme’s Grandma dies and they go to Grandma’s town for the funeral and wake.
The mystery–odd. Nothing really about the victims, which bucks standard mystery fiction tradition. (understand the victim you’ll understand the crime is kind of a golden age motto).
Instead, we learn about the suspects. It is an interesting perspective that Silvis pulls off. We don’t really need to know much about the victims. It is in understanding the suspects that the mystery unravels and the reveals are made.
The contrivance of the “Da Vinci Irregulars” seems an unnecessary way of getting Jayme and Ryan, involved. A trio of retired professionals, setting out to right wrongs and solve a cold case. Long, convoluted scenes that make little sense in the beginning, before we know what’s really going on. It would have been enough to have the crimes mentioned at Jayme’s grandma’s wake or funeral.
But despite the unncessary subterfuge of hooking Jayme and Ryan’s interest, we are finally on the move as the two are finally all in to investigate. And as the story unfolds, we learn more about DeMarco’s past, and what makes him the man he is today. He is a highly sympathetic character, one we root for in both love and profession. We want to see him succeed and be happy. We ache for his past and we hope for his future.
And this is really where Silvis’ writing shines, when taking on Ryan DeMarco.
In addition, there are beautiful, really poetic, descriptions of the setting, the smells of the earth, the sounds of the forest, very sensual, very real. Silvis can transport us to DeMarco’s trailer home growing up, and in the next sentence we are in the RV where he and Jayme travel, or in Jayme’s grandma’s home.
Although we do get a number of scene’s from Jayme’s point of view, we never really get a sense of who she is, except in the reflection of the men in her life.
In fact, I’d have given this 5 stars if only Jayme were drawn better. Oh, and perhaps other fleshed out female characters.
Jayme cries, she sulks and pouts, she manipulates, she whines and pries, she punishes and rewards with sex. And of course she is young (much younger than Ryan–oh, come on you male writers–really?) and beautiful.
It’s hard to get any sense of her as a professional cop.
We’ve got a young, smart, sexy woman who is in love with an DeMarco, an older man. A man who is grouchy on the best of days. Who is overweight. Who has a traumatic past that leaves him either dead on the inside or on the brink of rage.
So explain the appeal. Her “insight” that he might be a Daddy/brother substitute is trite.
She doesn’t grow or change at all. DeMarco goes through inner challenge and change. Jayme never has any internal struggle, we cannot fathom what draws her to DeMarco–what in her past makes her love him.
As for the other females, we’ve got 7 dead victims who we learn almost nothing about.
We have the librarian, the only female in the trio of “Da Vinci Care Irregulars”. Although we see and learn quite a bit about the males, Vincent and Hoyle, the female is nothing but a stock character–the librarian who reads tarot cards. Barely.
If only Silvis would write better and more female characters, he could earn a 5 star review in a snap.
