Sunscreen Shower, the new police procedural by Baltimore author JP Rieger, continues the story of the group of characters introduced in Clonk! as they lurch through life. The main character is Kev Dixit, a South Asian police detective who finds creative uses for his friends’ skills in serving and protecting the citizens of Baltimore. This is a group of friends who survived the horrors of high school together have managed to stay close over the decades since, despite wildly varying life paths.
In this story, Dixit is confronted at the outset by a bizarre pair of killings, which at first blush appear to be a murder-suicide of a couple named Matthiesen. The more he learns about them the less likely that seems. Both were research professors at Johns Hopkins University, well regarded, apparently well- adjusted and happily married. Something seems off.
Something is even more off when Dixit learns the husband has cleaned out the couple’s rather substantial bank accounts and sent the proceeds to the Cayman Islands. But an even bigger revelation is coming – the husband and wife were siblings, possibly even twins! The upper ranks of the police want to chalk this case up as a kinky murder-suicide and be done with it, but Dixit and his team just can’t quite let it go.
The characters of Dixit, his friends and his team in the police department are well-developed, even if they don’t always follow expectations. In fact, it’s those occasional quirks that make them so believably human. He thoroughly understands other people and takes care to give them tasks they can do well, even if, at times, he has to pressure them a little in the process. In that respect, he’s a thoughtful and supportive supervisor and friend.
Dixit has little time to focus on the Matthiesen case before a young woman is attacked in her home, hooded, made to sit on her bed, her neck wrapped in some kind of wire until she passes out. Then the assailant left. Before long a second such incident occurs, a little more violent, then a third – each one escalating, as if the attacker is practicing.
There’s nothing to link the victims, except that they are all young women soon to be married. Dixit has to battle the powers-that-be on this one, because he’d like a multi-jurisdiction task force to investigate these cases but it’s a no-go, even though the Baltimore department learned about one of the suburban cases only by accident.
This situation gives author Rieger the chance let Dixit do what he does very well – figure out a way around obstacles, particularly of the mindless bureaucratic kind. He marches on, stolidly doing the right thing, despite the forces arrayed against him, which include a particularly dim lieutenant originally from Canada, hired in preference to local talent.
In a separate plot, two of the friends – a physician and an actor – are trying to promote their book, using an uninterested public relations agent. If there were two more clueless clients, it’s hard to imagine what they’d be like. You get an inkling of what the PR maven is up against from the book title: Blood Brothers: How Two Longstanding Friends Saved Themselves From The Ugly Streets Of Baltimore In the Midst Of Personal Trials and Chaotic Lives – And The Bonds That Formed, Only To Be Tested, Time And Again, Within The City’s Dark Cultural Wasteland. These scenes are full of humour and although they break up the crime they are not especially integrated into the rest of the story. And, you find out about their real public relations goal, publicising an invention they call the Sunscreen Shower.
Lots is going on – did I mention a stranger is out to get Dixit? – when he finds a new straight-arrow academy grad on his hands. She carries the notion of political correctness to extremes, and Dixit’s valiant efforts to avoid saying anything inadvertently offensive are hilarious. But not as much as the sensitivity training he’s required to complete.
Both the cases – the possible murder-suicide and the attacks on brides-to-be – are complicated, and watching Dixit and his team make sense of an array of tiny details is a lot of fun. You also get a big-picture appreciation for the competing pressures faced by an urban police department and will wish for common sense to win out. That’s Dixit’s view, in any case.
Read our interview with author JP Rieger here.
Flock Publishing
Kindle
£3.79
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
