DESERT REMAINS

The IRB's Celebrating 10 Years of Intelligent Reviews October 2007-October 2017

Fiction

Family betrayals

DESERT REMAINS

A Gus Parker and Alex Mills Novel

By Steven Cooper

400 pp. Seventh Street Books

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

A new mystery writer makes his debut with the first in a series of mysteries featuring an unusual pair of sleuths. The novel opens with Phoenix homicide detective Alex Mills at the scene of an unusual crime.

A young woman named Elizabeth Spears has been brutally murdered, her body deliberately placed in a cave in the Arizona desert. Her meticulous killer left behind no murder weapon or incriminating evidence of any kind – only a bizarre calling card.

Carved into the cave wall is a huge mural depicting the murder and the victim’s last agonizing moments of life. Alex Mills has never seen anything like it, nor have his fellow detectives – not even star detective Timothy Chase, who used to work as a criminal profiler for the FBI.

To help solve this ghastly and baffling crime, Alex turns to his pal, eccentric psychic Gus Parker, who’s helped him on other cases, something the police like to keep on the down low in these cynical times.

When he’s not helping solve crimes or working as a medical imaging technician, Gus Parker and his fellow psychic Beatrice Vossenheimer enjoy publicly exposing phony TV psychics for the charlatans they are. He also performs readings for a select group of clients.

Gus’s psychic abilities began manifesting when he was a teenager. His visions are unpredictable, varying from clairvoyance to precognition. He can also talk to the ghost of his dead uncle. He never knows when a vision will come or what it will entail, and he can’t stop the visions from coming.

Though he has no interest in being famous, Gus gained some fame as a teenager when he solved the murder of a twelve-year-old altar boy – which was committed by the perverted priest who’d been molesting him. Now he must use his psychic powers to solve another murder.

When Alex takes Gus to the Spears crime scene, he immediately senses that the murderer has killed before and will probably kill again. All Gus can do is wait for more visions to come, and boy do they ever, because the killer he’s after has just gotten started.

Soon, more women are found in the caves of the Arizona desert, with carvings depicting each victim’s brutal murder etched into the cave walls to taunt the police. Gus experiences chilling psychic visions of a monster who wasn’t born that way, but made – a monster whose flesh and mind both bear the scars of a horrific childhood. But none of his visions reveal the killer’s face.

Meanwhile, Alex Mills is shocked and humiliated when his teenage son Trevor is arrested for possessing two pounds of marijuana with intent to sell. He was going to sell the pot for someone at school, but he won’t say who.

When the sadistic serial killer he’s chasing grows bolder, murdering a woman in her own home and carving a mural of her murder into her bedroom wall, public fury at the police department results in Alex being pulled off the case.

Gus Parker is forced to work with detective Timothy Chase to stop the killer, and both men are less than thrilled about it. On top of that, Gus has to deal with troubled, possibly mentally disturbed TV reporter Bridget Mulroney, who’s fallen in love with him – and whom his psychic visions predict may be the killer’s next victim…

Desert Remains is a riveting but flawed thriller. The writing is for the most part excellent, the prose crackling. I particularly liked author Steven Cooper’s use of children betraying fathers and fathers betraying children as recurring themes. 

Gus Parker and Alex Mills are very likable characters and can easily carry a series of novels. I also enjoyed the occasional doses of comedy injected to ease the tension, especially at the end where the killer lures Gus into a trap then quips, “How did you not see this coming if you’re so psychic?”

Unfortunately, while the writing is solid and the story compelling, the plotting is weak and predictable. The identity of the killer is very easy to guess. Some subtlety and more than one obvious red herring would have been nice.

Since the identity of the killer is so easy to guess, the story starts to drag as the reader impatiently waits for the sleuths to discover what he figured out long ago. A plot this thin should have been resolved in 250 pages, not 400.

Despite these flaws, I still recommend Desert Remains to mystery fans, as its story is compelling and its characters likable enough to generate an interest in the series. This reviewer is interested in reading the next novel.

Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com