Bad Scene
Book 3 in Max Tomlinson’s rapid-fire Colleen Hayes Mystery series, Bad Scene (Oceanview Publishing), can stand on its own feet, but that doesn’t mean that the characters don’t get knocked around.
The prologue sets us in the Amazon Rainforest … and, apparently, in an alarming cult that Colleen’s daughter Pamela has, seemingly quite willingly, entered. We the readers exit the scene and dive into Chapter 1 with an understanding that something deeply sinister is unfolding in the coming pages.
Going about her usual PI work, Colleen receives a tip from her “eyes and ears on the street,” a man named Lucky, about a plot against the mayor. Lucky also happens to be the last person to have seen her runaway daughter, and Colleen can’t help but ask if he has any leads … no luck. Ahem. His name certainly proves ironic when he gets mysteriously beat up and Colleen races to visit him in the hospital. Thanks to their earlier conversation, she has a solid idea of who’s to blame: a drug-dealing biker known unaffectionately as Shuggy Johnston, who just might have connections to neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.
FEAR AND LOATHING IN SAN FRANCISCO
Things escalate quickly when she then discovers a link between Shuggy, the assault on Lucky and her missing daughter. I’m loath to divulge too much of it because the twists and cliffhangers drive the drama at breakneck speed, so the synopsis bus slows to a stop right about here. One last teaser: some characters from the prior books might just make a cameo.
As Colleen takes the dark and dangerous steps necessary to ingratiate herself in the nefarious conglomerate, her fears about Pam seem increasingly valid. San Fran sure has its fault lines, and if you fall in with the wrong people, you may never see the foggy skyline again. If it leads to her daughter, though, Colleen’s willing to walk down this road to hell (even if it leads all the way out her hometown and into the jungle… ). Remember, she’s done it before, and it won her 14 years in jail but lost her Pam; hence, this antiheroine’s placement on the Venn diagram of good and evil is maybe still up for debate.
The book’s tone and lingo are, paradoxically, admirably derelict; some of the sentences spoken from criminals’ curled lips read like a foreign tongue. Colleen picks up the colloquialisms quickly, and so we’re verbally plunged into the parallel universe that is the Klan, the “Tribe” and this disgusting mission of the seriously misguided. It rings almost a little too true, and a little unbelievably believable. It’s not pretty to imagine these dealings taking place in our nonfiction lives, but Tomlinson’s prose sure is convincing.
A TRULY THRILLING THIRD INSTALLMENT
Similarly to the prior novel, San Francisco looms large as its own character with vivid quirks and questionable features, holding more than its fair share of shady characters. It’s deeply haunted by the ghosts of crimes past – almost as haunted as the book’s protagonist. Colleen feels echoes of her daughter everywhere, from a song on the radio to each time her gaze falls upon the carefully made extra bed she keeps in her apartment just in case Pam shows up. Intense parental guilt has something to do with it, too.
It’s this poignant, sharp-as-a-knife slice of vulnerability that really sets Colleen apart from the pack of mystery-main-characters, and all credit goes to the adept author. “With all due respect … you’ve got a history” a sergeant tells Colleen wryly. The same could be said for Max Tomlinson, only without the sarcasm, of course; Bad Scene proves a very good book.
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