Very Good; potentially a new series with sheriff's deputy Rhoda Swift; 13 years after 6 people were killed in a small California town, terror revisits at the same time a wrter comes to town.

I enjoyed this book, and felt like it was a good mystery. I liked the way that Chrystina's story was woven in with the investigation. I am about to start "Cyanide Wells", and hope it is as enjoyable as this one was.

Love Sharon McCone and her colleagues. This author never disappoints.

Good. Current and cold case murders get solved.

I loved that there were lots of suspects! I rated this very high.

Something terrible happend in Cascada Canyon 13 years ago and Deputy Rhoda Swift was there. People in Soledad County don't talk about it much including Rhoda but that is about to change. Plagued by what happened and aided by a journalist Guy Newberry, she sets out to solve that unsolved crime as well as the resent rash of mysterious deaths. What will they find?

Funny enough this is listed as Fiction and not a mystery. I must not know much about genres because it was a mystery to me. I went looking for another Marcia Muller book after reading Ice and Stone. This was the only one on the shelf at my library. All I can say is wow! This book was great. Even better than Ice and Stone. The character development was terrific! I need good character development to get into a book. And the mystery and twists and turns were wonderful. I had to stay up late one night (I love my sleep) to finish reading it because I couldn't put it down. I'm passing this on to my husband to read next.

Helen Harper’s witty urban fantasies never fail to delight me, and Brimstone Bound is no exception. The first-person narrator, Emma Bellamy, has almost finished her training as a detective in London when she’s given her final trainee assignment: the Supernatural Squad. Although no one in their right mind wants such a post, she’s determined to make the best of policing the city’s vampires, werewolves, and assorted other “supes.” That is, until she herself is brutally murdered and wakes up in the morgue without a scratch on her. She’s not a vampire now, or a zombie, or anything anyone has heard of. Maybe her boss knows – oh no, now he’s been murdered, although it’s made to look like an accident.

Fast-paced, full of innovative plot twists, and always engaging, Harper’s latest is a quick, juicy read.

An emotionally complex character-driven mystery. Sheriff's deputy Rhoda Swift's territory is Northern California along the coast and the communities she patrols are spread out and thinly populated. Summer tourists and rich people who own summer homes are all that is keeping the few open businesses going. A massacre of two families that took place near Point Deception thirteen years previously has seriously poisoned the spirit of the year-around locals as well, so they have nothing to fight the economic downturn. Hard drinking is the main occupation when the residents come home from what work there is, including the cops. Despite the open murder case of the two families, no one wants to talk about it or solve it.

Then, a New York journalist, Guy Newberry, comes to town asking questions about the old case. At the same time, the body of a young girl washes up on the beach, a girl everyone had seen standing next to a disabled car with the hood up but all had driven by without stopping, including Swift. As Swift begins her investigation, aware of her dereliction of duty in not stopping to help the girl, she learns many residents drove by without stopping. She becomes aware of the general spiritual rot that has debilitated her county, so she teams up with the handsome Newberry, hoping to finally put closure to the old murder while solving the new one. Could it be they are linked?

Swift is not like Muller's other series stars; she has been a benumbed police officer for more than a decade, tainted early in her career by mistakes made at the massacre. She became near alcoholic for years and gave up drinking shortly before Newberry arrives. Her self-confidence and determination are born anew from a decade of somnolence and unacknowledged guilt, but once awakened to her self-imposed numbness, she wants to start being a cure for problems instead of covering it all up. Muller's other heroines become hardened by their exposure to crime through decades of solving mysteries; Swift's progression is quite different by being shell shocked early in her police career.

Rhoda Swift seems like an interesting new series character!

This non McCone mystery got off to a bit of a slow start for me. I wondered whether this was because it isn't part of the long running McCone series and therefore possibly different from what I was subconciously expecting but I've also read (ok, devoured) all Muller's other books that I could get my hands on including those featuring Elena Oliverez and Joanna Stark so I am aware that Muller can write other stuff too. I think it's the billing as a "thriller" that had set me thinking down the wrong lines. I'm not quite sure of the technical definition of a thriller but I think of somehting more suspenseful when I think of a thriller. Which is only a complaint about the marketing of this book. I'm finding it to be a very competent mystery full of interesting characters.

A young woman is stranded on a coastal highway and is seen by several of the drivers who pass her by. Then she disappears.

Police figure she got a ride and will be returning for her car, but days later she is found dead and local sheriff's Deputy Rhoda Swift feels guilty, she was among those sho passed by without stopping.

The death creates a fissure in the slowly dying community that hasn't been the same since a mass murder in the canyons of the area, a crime that has brought a writer among them asking questions about the massacre of two families.

Now both Swift and the writer, Guy Newberry, are asking questions. And two other woman turn up dead. There is something very serious happening in this town, and the short-staffed sheriff's department seems to be coming up short. Swift must look at her own past in her efforts to bring justice to the 13-year-old crime.

This is not my Marcia Muller book — I've read a number of her Sharon McCone novels and frankly, had a love-hate relationship with the character. But I don't have that with Rhoda Swift or this story. Swift is a gutsy and smart cookie - there's no self-pity for her situation or mistakes that she has made in the past. Just a job that she has and is determined to handle and see through to the end. This is a tense, suspenseful thriller that builds and builds, keeping the reader riveted to the pages.

I'm not sure what I was expecting with this one, but it surpassed my initial thoughts. It's a bit of a slow start, but then you're hooked. Fun little read and I will surely be keeping an eye out for future installments. Likable characters, believable world-building = fun escape for a few hours.