Shifting Skin

First paragraphs:

Jon Spicer looked around what used to be his weight training room and sighed. Bare plaster walls faced him, exposed surfaces still raw from where he'd scrubbed them with sandpaper. The carpet was hidden by dust sheets that stretched from skirting board to skirting board. In the corner the steam machine looked like the victim of a clumsy shave, scraps of dry wallpaper stuck all over it.

He started peeling apart last week's local paper, separating the pages and laying them across the small table in the middle of the room. Immediately, and even as he tried to look away, his eyes were snagged by the front-page headline: BUTCHER OF BELLE VUE STRIKES AGAIN.

Jon Spicer is the detective from Killing the Beasts, Chris Simms previous novel. Jon has an interesting pregnant girlfriend, a tempting female friend named Nikki Kingston, a useless dog, and a useless boss. There are many characters painted in rich detail and in a way where you want to know more.

Killing the Beasts, my introduction to Chris Simms novels, was interesting because it was an understated human detective novel in the middle of a flood of hard American style detective novels. Shifting Skin is a little less novel to me because I already know the main characters. You get the problem with a series of books with the same main characters. Every book has to introduce the characters to new readers at the risk of boring existing readers. Chris does a creditable job but the book gets a rating of one point less because the story is not quite as exciting as Killing the Beasts.

I hope Chris's next book spends less time on Jon Spicer's wife, dog, and football. Perhaps it is time to have Jon's sister or Nikki Kingston as a main character. Nikki Kingston could lead into a really different story.

Conclusion

Read Killing the Beasts then [amazon 075288168X inline].