THE BURNING

4 stars out of 5

Deputy Coroner Clay Edison has led a complicated life, but now that he's married to psychologist Amy and has a young daughter Charlotte, it seems more settled. Then, a nearby California wildfire kicks in, casting a literal cloud on his life and knocking out electric power. Charlotte and Amy have retreated to a still-lit, less smoky part of the state until everything blows over, but she and Clay stay in touch by phone.

His relationship with his ex-felon brother, Luke, remains unstable; once close buddies, they've become for the most part estranged as Luke exited jail and tries to get his life back together. Still, Clay cares about him; and when he's called to a murder scene in an affluent neighborhood and discovers more than a dead body - clues that Luke may somehow have been involved - he tries to track him down. That's not easy, though, because Luke seems to have gone missing; even his hippy dippy wife, with whom he lives off the grid, has no idea why he left or where he's been for several days.

Clay's off-the-record investigation leads to even more suspicions that Luke may have been involved, forcing him - to his way of thinking - to do some cover-up work that threatens his own future. While I concede that blood can be thicker than water, I admit to losing a fair amount of respect for Clay - whom I've come to like as a leading man over the first three books in the series - because of his actions here. That's especially because - to MY way of thinking - everything that came to light in the end would have been discovered by the police had they been allowed unfettered access to all the evidence from the git-go.

But the chase is exciting and dangerous, and it held my attention so well that I polished it off in a single day by pushing back my bedtime by half an hour or so. And while in the end everything isn't coming up roses and a few ends are left untied, all that means to me is that there's plenty of fodder for the next book. I'm already up for it (or these days, should I say I'm down?) As for this one, I thank the publisher, via NetGalley, for allowing me to read and review a pre-release copy. 

The Burning by Jonathan Kellerman and Jesse Kellerman (Ballantine Books, September 2021); 304 pp.