Fear Nothing

The last thing Boston Detective D.D. Warren remembers is walking the crime scene after dark. Then, a creaking floorboard, a low voice crooning in her ear… She is later told she managed to discharge her weapon three times. All she knows is that she is seriously injured, unable to move her left arm, unable to return to work.

D.D. may not be back on the job, but she is back on the hunt. Because the Rose Killer isn’t just targeting lone women; he is targeting D.D. And D.D. knows there is only one way to take him down:

Fear nothing.

 

I received this book for free from in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Review by Travis Starnes

Fear Nothing is the 7^th book in the D.D. Warren series and follows her on the track of a gruesome serial killer and recovery from an excruciating injury.  As seems to be the trend lately this is a book in the middle of a series that I am coming into cold.  Luckily this is another one that works without having read the previous adventures of Detective Warren.

As characters go Gardner’s seem fairly aggressive, which isn’t unusual for detective style mysteries, but it does make them a lot less likable.  It is hard to tell if this is an offshoot of the story, seeing as how a character sidelined because of a debilitating and extremely painful injury would indeed be very angry and aggressive, or if this is just her way of writing characters.  Regardless the continuing characters get enough of an introduction to be fully fleshed out for the new reader while the new characters have some good depth to them.  Gardner did an excellent job on the backstory of the Glen sisters and each was totally unique and interesting.  I particularly like how their story plays out at the end of the book.  It was both poignant and felt completely believable.

It took me a bit to get into the plot as I was trying to figure out both what the mystery was going to be and who the characters were.  Having read a lot of mystery novels over the years I chalk a lot of that up to starting in the middle of a series.  I am betting regular Gardner readers would feel this book started with a bang and moved ahead at a brisk pace, and they would probably be right.  Something I found particularly interesting about this book was how it was a study of the idea of pain.  It used it not just as a plot device for both Dr. Glen and the recovering Warren, but Gardner did a lot of work twisting the theme of pain throughout the story.

This is an interesting and pretty engrossing mystery novel and fans of detective style fiction will find this worth reading.  I enjoyed the journey of Detective Warren enough that I plan on going back and reading the rest of her stories to see what I have missed.