Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆½
This takes place in the ski resort of Park City, during the event it’s best known for: the Sundance Film Festival. Beginning with a plummet from a chair lift, the town is plagued by a series of “accidents” – quotes used advisedly. For they are actually the work of a female vigilante calling herself the Sword of Justice, and dedicated to punishing men for their crimes against her gender. On the other side is Belle Bannon, a former Marine, who had anger issues even before going into the military. Now a hunting guide and member of the ski patrol, she is determined to find and stop the killer.
However, it’s complicated by the fact that the Sword of Justice has close ties to some very unpleasant and dangerous people, involved in the local drug trade, led by Danny Pagano. He does not take kindly to Belle’s investigation, and the closer she gets to the target, the more he feels threatened. It all leads to a plan for a mass chemical attack on the town’s water supply, with the aim of targeting a law-enforcement officer investigating the gang. Belle, along with help from a descendant of The Sundance Kid who now works for the DEA, needs to find a way to stop this, end the Sword of Justice’s vigilante campaign, and survive a final face-off deep underground, in a disused silver mine.
To get the bad out of the way first, this desperately needs an editor to tidy this up. It feels as if, in the first draft, it was originally written in the first person, but was then changed to the third person. However, the update seems to have been executed sloppily, meaning there are still multiple sentences where the perspective is inconsistent, changing in the same sentence, e.g. “they had the place to ourselves.” Elsewhere, exact sentences get repeated a page or two apart, or we learn Pagano is from Denver, but shortly after that, Belle tells him to head “back to Phoenix.” Normally, I’m oblivious to this kind of thing; this is the first time I’ve felt compelled to mention it, which should give you some idea how prevalent it is.
On the other hand, that I still not only finished it, I was adequately entertained, is a clear positive. You get a good sense of place, and the silver mine is an excellent, spooky location, used more than once. It’s an interesting twist to have an ex-military heroine whose mental problems are not the result of PTSD, and Belle is someone you’ll find it easy to cheer on. I’m not entirely convinced about the logic of poisoning a whole town to nail one person, even if you do try and blame it on an industrial accident. But it does certainly up the stakes, and things are fairly non-stop thereafter. Falls an earnest bit of proof-reading short of a solid recommendation.
Author: Mike Pace
Publisher: Foundations Book Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 3 in the Belle Bannon series.