Officer Carrie Santero is the first female cop in the history of the Coyote Township Police Department, located in sleepy western Pennsylvania's former coal country--"Pennsyltucky," people from the city call it. Santero's boss, chief of police Bill Waylon, sees her as a "race car" and is convinced that "a small-town PD was going to either sap the soul right out of her or drive her mental." As the gore-and-grief-filled The Thief of All Light progresses, the reader may find herself wondering, Not both?
Santero, a local gal, is in her fourth year on the force when she takes the lead on her first homicide: a disemboweled male corpse is found in a van parked outside a gay club. After two young women--one is Santero's best friend--go missing, Waylon decides to try to coax out of hiding his former partner, Jacob Rein. Rein is unusually canny, but he has been something of a recluse since serving 16 months of a four-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter after killing a child with his car.
Author Bernard Schaffer, a police detective who has previously published books independently, offers a gangbusters mainstream debut with The Thief of All Light, the first in the projected Santero and Rein series. There's great stuff here on the tensions between the old and new police guard, and the spiky dialogue elucidates character winningly. As for the story, it contains a couple of good surprises and one act shocking enough to make Hannibal Lecter lose his appetite. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer