Death Hampton, Introducing Detective Jenrico, Book 1 in The Detective Jericho Series, is the second book in the series that I gave read. The first book in the series that I read was Book 2, The Battle of Jericho. Death Hampton, Introducing Detective Jenrico was an exciting read, the promising beginning for a new detective series. The opening scene, where a stocking masked man appears to have broken into a woman’s home and is about to rape her in her own bed, grabs the reader’s attention. We soon discover that the rapist is the woman’s husband playing one of his twisted sex games with her. But what appeared to be a rape wasn’t all that far from the reality of what was to come.
The husband is demented and hires a professional killer, a man called “Mort”, to kill his wife and make it look like an accident. Susanna, his wife, over hears this when her husband leaves his phone on during their negotiations. She turns the tables on him. This book has hired killers, blackmailers and shady lawyers. It’s a real page turner and keeps the reader turning the pages until the very end. All the characters are well developed and so like real people that the temporary suspension of disbelief is natural. The story so realistic that it could have been taken from yesterday’s headlines.
On the whole, this story does come to a satisfying conclusion, but the author does leave us hanging on a few points. What happened with the developing love relationship between Jericho and Susanna? Did the shrink give him a clean bill of health so he could return to active duty? There were a few technical errors as well, like calling a semiautomatic pistol an automatic pistol. That one jumped out at me and hit me in the face because I’m a gun person. Taking all those things into consideration, this is still a book I would/will read again.