Stan Richards

A police officer suffers a brain trauma during a car accident and starts to have overpowering visions of his mother's unsolved rape and murder fifteen years before, after which his father killed himself. Driven to investigate, he soon begins to suspect...himself. This book is as dark and disturbing as they come, and Richards writes well, doing a great job invoking the Boulder, Colorado setting. Still, the officer's alcohol-fueled quest into the closed case file, his encounters with witnesses, a rapist, and a rape victim, his relationship with the police chief, who was his father's buddy in Vietnam, and his involvement with a bartender/dancer/student who looks like his mother don't quite add up to the powerful whole that this book is trying hard to become. Richards has chosen near-impossible subject matter here, and made his problem more difficult by using a first-person narrative. He comes close to pulling the whole thing off despite that, but the plot, despite its slow revelations of what actually happened fifteen years before, remains a bit too linear.… (mere)