Publication Day Review: Illusion of Truth: A Novel by James L’Etoile

 

The third book of the police procedural series that began with The Face of Greed delivers in every possible way for the reader. Illusion of Truth: A Novel begins a few months after River of Lies and starts with a bang.

 

The call out to a local church was a ploy to get police officers to respond. Allegedly, according to the caller to dispatch, there was some sort of disturbance involving a large crowd looting a church in North Sacramento. The church is located on the edge of the territory held by a certain gang though the church itself is supposed to be neutral territory and safe from all the gangs. For the several officers that responded to the scene, the place was anything but safe. Within minutes of their arrival, two separate improvised explosive devices are detonated.

 

Several officers are seriously injured in the blasts. That includes Sergent Brian Connor who recently asked Homicide Detective Emily Hunter to move in with him. She said she wasn’t ready. With his injuries now, she may never have the chance to change her mind.

 

Homicide Detective Emily Hunter is very used to getting the middle of the night call to go to a crime scene. This time the call is from a lieutenant who tells her to respond instead at the hospital. It was supposed to be his night off. Instead, Brian Connor is fighting for his life in the trauma unit.

 

Detective Hunter wants in on the investigation. One that is being led by her partner, Javier Medina. Not that he is not a good detective. He certainly is. But, she can’t just sit by. She is going to be involved, no matter what. Since that will happen anyway, her Lieutenant gives her the go ahead to work the case, but she has to follow Medina’s lead to the letter or she is benched. She agrees. Before long the case leads them in ways they never saw coming.

 

This third book in the police procedural series published by Oceanview Publishing is a good one. A read that could stand on its own if you are new to the series. But, those who choose to read the series in order will get far more out of the book.

 

One aspect of this series is the developing relationship between Hunter and Connor. So too is the evolving political scene as well as the fallout from earlier cases Hunter has worked. There are other aspects as well that continue to be developed and evolve. Those aspects are why this is a series that should be read in order.

 

Bottom Line---A very good read and strongly recommended.

 
 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/3YynS1j

 

 

My digital ARC came from the author with no expectation of a read or a review.

 

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2026

Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Other People’s Houses by Clare Mackintosh

  

Other People’s Houses by Clare Mackintosh, the third book in the Detective Constable Ffion Morgan and Detective Sergeant Leo Brady police procedural series, will be released in mid-September by Sourcebooks Landmark. Morgan is a member of the Wales police force and Brady is part of the Cheshire constabulary. Since lawbreakers rarely observe geographical boundaries, the law enforcement offices along the national borders often collaborate on what turns out to be the same crime.

True to the title, the story is all about houses that belong to other people. Morgan has found a house to buy, finally, but her real estate agent suddenly is not responding to her calls to set up a date to complete the transaction. She discovers that the property is still being shown and eventually she learns her agent has in fact accepted a higher offer for the place she thought was hers. Morgan is under notice to leave her current home and is scrambling to find a place to go. She is understandably unhappy with real estate agents in general when she is called to the scene of an overturned kayak with a drowned woman who turns out to be one of a group of estate agents who had been celebrating a bit too much over the weekend.

Brady is investigating a puzzling string of burglaries in a wealthy community known as The Hill. In addition, Brady’s ex-wife, with whom he has a strained relationship, lives nearby and is desperate to become part of the in crowd on The Hill. Her attempts to imitate the high-end décor of these houses with cheap substitutes and designer knockoffs and to ingratiate herself with the residents are pathetic.

The third case that is unfolding in the background has been re-opened after doubt was cast on the verdict delivered 10 years previously. The cold homicide case is receiving an enormous amount of publicity. Morgan is entranced by a podcast that is following the case and listens to each new episode as quickly as it is dropped.

A very good read. Smooth pacing, a cleverly constructed plot with plenty of suspects in the murder, a frustrating lack of leads on the burglaries, and an ingenious resolution hidden in plain sight, my favorite kind. Using social media to progress the third storyline is a novel approach. The questionable antics of some real estate agents, the linguistic challenges of the Welsh language, and wealthy mean girl behavior get a full airing here.

I especially like the dual jurisdiction setup, it gives the reader a look at two contrasting ways of doing the same thing. Plus it adds another element of conflict to the story as the law enforcement officers have to meet the requirements of their respective commands while collaborating with their peers across the border which sometimes demands negotiation. Other series use this technique effectively. The Posadas County mysteries by Steven Havill are set along the border of the United States and Mexico and the county law officers often work with the Mexican police. And in his Chickasaw Nation series, Kris Lackey partners a Lighthorse policeman of the Chickasaw Nation with an Oklahoma sheriff’s deputy. In Dead Man’s Mistress, David Housewright used the differences in gun laws in the United States and in Canada to get his detective out of a tight situation.

Fans of police procedurals will want to look at this series. Recommended.

·         Publisher: ‎Sourcebooks Landmark

·         Publication date: ‎September 16, 2025

·         Language: ‎English

·         Print length: ‎368 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎1728296544

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-1728296548

 

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/41MZrzp

 

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2025

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

Review: River of Lies: A Novel by James L’Etoile

 

River of Lies: A Novel by James L'Etoile is the second book in the Detective Emily Hunter Mystery series that began with Face of Greed. Like any good police procedural series does, this read builds on previous events and ongoing issues so I strongly recommend reading that book first before you get to this one.

 

Detective Emily Hunter of the Sacramento Police Department has had her date for the evening with Brian Conner ruined as he got called into work suddenly. She is familiar with the problem and understands that things happen. Still, she is a bit bummed when she gets back home. She is barely inside the house when she gets her own call from the Watch Commander.

 

Other folks have had a far worse horrible evening than a cancelled date. The disturbance that her date was called in to work for has turned into some sort of mass casualty event at a local homeless camp. Fire swept through the camp displacing many who were already having a very hard time. There are casualties tonight at the third fire in a homeless camp in the last two weeks. Lieutenant Terri Williams does not yet know if they have any homicides, but the Chief wants her out there and working the case. She has a reputation and that is playing a major role in this situation. She heads out the door and calls her partner, Javier Madina, to arrange picking him up on the way to what is left of the homeless camp.

 

When they arrive at the still smoldering scene along the banks of the river, it is clear that it is a bad deal. The number of ambulances makes it clear that many folks were hurt. As they talk to witnesses and fire personnel, it is clear that the fire was a deliberate act of arson intended to do a lot of damage and burn everyone out of their shelters. If that wasn’t enough, various witness state that there was also a person attacking folks with a baseball bat Not only that, they have at least one body with a clear gun shot wound to the head.

 

While Detectives Simmons and Taylor had been the primary on the first two fires, those incidents and this new one are now all Hunter’s and Medina’s. The fires are obviously linked and escalating. Even the media has figured that much out and the public pressure is mounting by the hour. As things heat up in Sacramento, literally and figuratively, it is up to Hunter and Medina to find the culprits responsible and put an end to it.

 

This second book in the Detective Emily Hunter Mystery Series is another solidly good read. I am skipping a lot of things so as to not ruin the read for others, but this book, and the series, has a lot of storytelling meat on the bones. Detectives Hunter and Media are fully fleshed out human beings with their own personal lives beyond the job. The same is true for many of the secondary characters. Interpersonal relationships matter as these are not cookie cutter caricatures. Such details add a richness to the read that does nothing to slow down the story in any way.

 

River of Lies: A Novel by James L'Etoile is well worth your time.

  

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/44kSq9u

 

I picked this up awhile back at Amazon using funds in my Amazon Associate account.

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2025

Review: Face of Greed: A Detective Emily Hunter Mystery by James L’Etoile

 

Last week, Aubrey Nye Hamilton reviewed Face of Greed: A Detective Emily Hunter Mystery by James L’Etoile. If you have read her review, you know she liked it a lot. After setting up her review, I went looking for it at my local library with no luck. I went looking at NetGalley where I remembered recently seeing it offered. Oceanview Publishing still had it listed and so I requested it. Thankfully, it was instantaneously available with no gatekeeper delay and I was soon hooked. 

 

Detective Emily Hunter and Detective Javier Medina are working in Sacramento, California. In recent years she has been assigned to the Detective Bureau of the Sacramento Police Department. She is on call one evening when Lieutenant Ford, Watch Commander, calls her with an assignment. One is dead, one is injured, at what according to the initial report, is some sort of home invasion gone very wrong.

 

If that was not enough, both the Mayor and Chief of Police are already on scene. That means politics, powerful people, and probably pressure to get results quickly and quietly from on high. It is a cold evening this night in April and the neighborhood is clearly upscale where a murder just does not happen. But, it did this night, and Rodger Townsend is very much dead.

 

The deceased was fairly wealthy and had donated a considerable sum of money to Mayor Stone’s last campaign. Not only that, but Ridger Townsend was also the campaign manager. Those facts at least partially explain why the Mayor is involved. The Mayor makes it clear from the start he expects how the investigation is to be done and that includes leaving the widow, Lori Richardson, alone.

 

Something Detective Hunter is not willing to do as she follows the evidence and believes that Lori is involved all the way up to her beautiful face and then some. That puts her and her partner on a repeated collision course with the Mayor and her own internal police chain of command. She enjoys poking the bear with people of power and intends to do it regardless of how much it could cost her professionally or how it reflects on her partner.

 

At the same time, she is dealing with a serious issue at home as her elderly mother has dementia. Connie Hunter is 74 and slowly getting worse. How Emily Hunt will help her mother and whether she can or not she can is a major secondary storyline in the book.

 

An entertaining read, Face of Greed: A Detective Emily Hunter Mystery by James L’Etoile is a good police procedural. As Aubrey pointed out in her review, it relies significantly on the trope of a smart good cop beset by incompetent supervisors. A hallmark of police procedurals and one that is long familiar to readers.

 

Despite that issue, the overall read is fast moving and highly entertaining. According to the note in the beginning of the digital ARC, there is a second one coming in the pipeline. I very much look forward to the read.

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/40khNa1  

As noted in the review, my reading copy came from the publisher, OceanView Publishing, by way of a NetGalley ARC.

 

Kevin R. Tipple ©2023 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Face of Greed by James L’Etoile

James L’Etoile worked within the criminal justice system for 20 years. His crime fiction is laden with the authentic detail only someone with that kind of experience can supply. His stand-alone novel Black Label (Level Best Books, 2021) won a 2022 Silver Falchion award at Killer Nashville. Dead Drop (Level Best Books, 2022), first in the series about Maricopa County Detective Nathan Parker, was nominated for 2023 Anthony and Lefty awards. Now Oceanview Publishing is releasing L’Etoile’s first book in a series about Sacramento, California, police detective Emily Hunter and her partner Javier Medina on November 7, 2023.

Hunter and Medina are called to what appears to be a violent home invasion in which the home owner is killed and his wife beaten. Both the mayor and the chief of police were on the scene when Hunter and Medina arrived, signaling the victims had political connections. In fact, the home owner was Roger Townsend, who ran the mayor’s last election campaign. The Townsends’ social and political pull permeated and hindered the investigation considerably, yet Hunter and Medina, who make a good team, managed to uncover some questionable alliances between the Townsends and local gangs. They soon began to wonder if the ostensible home invasion wasn’t a cover for something else entirely.

This is an encouraging start to a new police procedural series. The interaction and collaborative cooperation between Hunter and Medina are among the best parts of the book. The subplot of Hunter’s search for care for her failing mother hits home for a lot of folks these days. The mingling of gangs and politicians with questionable ethics is well done.

However, I feel compelled to point out that I am really tired of the competent cop fighting inept upper management trope that is so common now. Not that useless managers don’t exist, I have had more than my fair share of them. But portraying upper management as blithering idiots is not realistic. It’s more accurate to show them as consumed with the administrative demands of their positions: the higher up the chain any employee in any organization moves, the more attuned they have to be to financial and political dynamics. I always thought Steven Havill handled the uninformed manager in the early Bill Gastner books exceptionally well. Gastner made a point of getting along with his boss, no matter how little he knew, because Gastner understood it was part of his job. Gastner also recognized the strengths his boss brought to the sheriff’s office and acknowledged them openly. It’s an approach more writers of police procedurals should consider.

Booklist gave this title a starred review.

 

·         Publisher: ‎Oceanview Publishing (November 7, 2023)

·         Language: ‎English

·         Hardcover: ‎320 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎1608095878

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-1608095872

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/40khNa1   

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2023

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

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: The Promised Land by Barry Maitland

After a six-year hiatus Barry Maitland released the 13^th book in his Kathy Kolla and David Brock police procedural series, The Promised Land (Allen & Unwin, 2019). As to be expected after a lapse of time that long, changes have occurred in the main characters’ lives. Kolla is a new Detective Chief Inspector and Brock has retired. Kolla is dealing with a couple of brutal murders so similar they have to be by the same hand and a new boss who is expressing doubts as to her ability before she’s even into her investigation. Brock on the other hand is at loose ends, not sure of what to do with himself. He is spending most of his time at the home of his long-time girlfriend on the Sussex coast but is reluctant to let his London house go.

The third murder occurs in the home of Charles Pettigrew, the owner of a small publishing house, with enough evidence to give Kolla unequivocal proof that Pettigrew is the killer. Pettigrew on the other hand tells a disjointed story about being approached by someone who claimed to have an unknown manuscript by George Orwell, which he says is somehow related to the murder. He can provide no proof and he is promptly incarcerated to await trial.

Pettigrew’s lawyer would like to use the insanity defense, as it seems to be the only recourse, and she asks Brock to look around a bit to see if he can corroborate any part of Pettigrew’s story. If Brock can show definitively the story is fictional, the lawyer will have stronger support for the insanity plea.

Brock is bored enough to accept the task, thinking he will give it a few hours and wrap up. As generally happens in this series, his plans go awry and events spiral out of his control as well as Kolla’s. The result is a complicated story with a most unexpected resolution.

In addition to the police investigation, there is considerable information about the competition among publishers for important manuscripts such as the unknown Orwell. How one single book can make or break a career and just how far some people will go to obtain that make-or-break book is all too clear by the last few pages.

Recommended for fans of police procedurals and followers of literary mysteries.

·         Publisher: ‎ Allen & Unwin (January 7, 2019)

·         Language: ‎ English

·         Paperback: ‎ 320 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎ 1760632678

·         ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1760632670

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2022

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

Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: High Road by Jeff Carson

Jeff Carson writes an independently published police procedural series that has developed a significant following. Set in the mountains of Colorado, David Wolf progresses from police detective to sheriff and steps back into the role of chief of detectives in the course of 15 books. The 16^th is scheduled for publication in November 2022. Ratings on Amazon and GoodReads are consistently four stars or higher with thousands of reviews for each title. For those that wonder if finding a large audience is possible without the support of a traditional publisher, it’s clear that at least for Carson, the answer is yes.

In the most recent title High Road (Cross Atlantic Publishing, 2021) the district attorney from neighboring Crow County asks for the loan of Wolf from the Byron County Sheriff’s Department to investigate the murder of the only son of Crow County’s sheriff Clark Mustaine.

Mustaine and Wolf have a history from playing high school football years ago and both have long memories. Mustaine, physically large, was a bully as a teenager and he’s a bully as an adult. The loss of his son has pushed him over the edge and he assaults a potential witness. The removal of Mustaine from the case is imperative but no one can reason with him. The DA hopes that Wolf can make him see the need to back off.

Wolf reluctantly agrees to assist. Mustaine is overtly uncooperative and verbally combative. He focuses, with no evidence, on two young women who were in the same bar as his son just before his death. Wolf not only has an investigation to lead but he has to watch Mustaine to keep him from overstepping again.

I am happy to have discovered this new-to-me small town police procedural series. This entry has an original plot and some appealing characters. Readers looking for a new author to binge might add Carson to their list. Fans of Western police procedurals and small town mysteries will especially want to consider these books.

·         ASIN: ‎ B09HB91XZG

·         Publisher: ‎ Cross Atlantic Publishing (December 7, 2021)

·         Publication date: ‎ December 7, 2021

·         Language: ‎ English

·         File size: ‎ 1576 KB

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2022

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