FFB Review: Flashback by Ted Wood

Friday means Friday’s Forgotten Books hosted by Patti Abbott. Make sure you check out the full list over at Patti’s blog.

Reid Bennett has been police chief of Murphy’s Harbour in Canada for three years now. That means he knows the locals pretty well and is very much aware of all the young people in the area. He knows that the kids he sees down Main Street are not local. They also seem to be the kind of kids waiting for trouble to happen.

They are and they will be more than once. The bigger issue is the body in the lake. More accurately, the body in the trunk of the car that was found submerged out in the lake. The car was recovered and towed to a nearby garage where the body was later found in the trunk. Moira Waites is the deceased and she had just left her husband, quite possibly for good, the day before.

Whatever future she had has now been destroyed with her death. The spouse is always a suspect and husband, John Waites, is definitely a suspect. Not only because he is the spouse and part of the argument they were having before she supposedly left, his behavior now is a bit off as he seems far more worried about the status of the car, his wife’s friends, and a host of other issues instead of the shocking loss of his wife.

That isn’t all that is going on either in Murphy’s Harbour as a bank robber who promised to get even with Bennett is on the way, and more. The tale is complicated and this installment is a good one.  Flashback is part of a series that should be read in order starting with Dead In The Water. People come and go in this series and the books interconnect making reading in order a good idea. As always, multiple mysteries are at work and there is plenty of action keeping things moving and the pages turning. 

Make sure you check out Aubrey Nye Hamilton’s review of Flashback that she did back in August. You can read that review here. Because of her review, I went to the beginning and read the first book, Dead In The Water. That became an FFB review back in September and I have kept going. The last book in the series, A Clean Kill, is only available to me at Amazon where I can get it in eBook form for $6.15. That price is just not in my budget right now. So, things may end here. We shall see.

Flashback

Ted Wood

Charles Scribner’s Sons

1992

ISBN# 0-684-19414-7

Hardback (also available in paperback and digital formats)

224 Pages

Material supplied by the good folks of the Dallas Public Library. 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton Reviews: Flashback by Ted Woods

Last year’s Bouchercon was in Toronto. As always after an encounter with the Canadian mystery writing community, I come away determined to identify and incorporate more Canadian authors into my reading. That is easier to say than to do, apparently. I am avoiding book purchases while downsizing the current holdings so I searched the library catalogs in the area--I have access to collections in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia--without success. Fewer Canadian and Australian mysteries are to be found in the area libraries while English, Irish, and Scottish are well-represented. Why would be an interesting investigation. So I threw in the towel and bought a few books by Canadian authors, including a Reid Bennett title by Ted Wood. Bennett features in 10 procedurals released between 1983 and 1995 as the only law enforcement agent in fictional Murphy’s Harbor, a small resort town in Ontario. His sidekick Sam the German shepherd fills in for the missing support staff, sniffing out drugs and taking down bad guys as needed.

In Flashback (Scribner, 1992) Bennett’s attention is divided between his job and the impending arrival of his first child. In a surprisingly complicated plot, teen gangs target local shops for whirlwind destruction, a submerged car is found in the nearby lake with a body inside, and a felon who vowed vengeance on Bennett years earlier escapes prison. The identity of the drowned woman seems clear at first but locating her husband to confirm it proves to be difficult. The name of a well-known Toronto film producer who has a week-end cottage in town crops up often enough to indicate involvement in this unprecedented crime wave but the nature of that involvement is ambiguous. Bennett runs back and forth between the hospital where his wife is undergoing a lengthy labor and his town where crime scenes and suspects continue to shift. An understated theme that runs throughout is the town’s relationship to the Native Americans on the nearby reservation.

Ted Wood’s first-hand knowledge of life as a Toronto police officer comes through clearly in these early police procedurals. The first book in the series Dead in the Water was shortlisted for the 1984 New Blood Dagger Award and the 1984 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel. Wood was president of Crime Writers of Canada in 1987 and in 1999 he was given the association’s Derrick Murdoch award, which recognizes extraordinary achievement in Canadian crime writing. He also wrote, under the name Jack Barnao, three books featuring John Locke, an ex-SAS operative who is now a bodyguard to the rich and famous.

Wood’s books in both series occasionally crop up in the Kindle deals of the day lists that circulate widely. In any form they are well worth the committed mystery reader’s attention.

·         Hardcover: 224 pages

·         Publisher: Scribner; 1st American ed edition (August 1, 1992)

·         Language: English

·         ISBN-10: 0684194147

·         ISBN-13: 978-0684194141

Aubrey Hamilton ©2018

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal IT projects by day and reads mysteries at night.