Review:
THE FEVER KILL by Tom Piccirilli
Review by Sandra Ruttan
Crease has reached a critical juncture in his life, and before he can figure out how to move forward he needs to return to his home town and try to solve an old crime that destroyed his father’s life.
Mary Burke was just a young girl who’d been having a tea party with her dolls the day she was kidnapped from her yard. The kidnappers demanded a ransom of $15,000. Crease’s father, the local sheriff, handled the exchange, and things went bad. The money disappeared and Mary was shot and killed, the kidnappers never apprehended.
Crease’s father descended into alcoholism until his death, and Crease was forced out of town. Now a cop himself, he’s spent so much time working undercover he’s as guilty as the men he’s trying to bring to justice. With a marriage on the rocks and a son who won’t speak to him, Crease has gotten his drug-dealing boss’s mistress pregnant, and his boss is out for revenge.
This is a classic story of a man who must confront his demons before he can move forward in his life, but Piccirilli goes beyond that, to show the ultimate futility of trying to settle old scores while you compound problems from the past with new mistakes. Through Crease, I could understand the sound logic behind many flawed choices people make, a logic Crease can’t argue with, as much as he tries. No trite or contrived twists, the story is so natural you feel you should have seen what was coming, but didn’t. The writing is superb, the suspense is intense, and Piccirilli caps it off with one of the best endings ever. One of the best reads of the year.