"Flight" by Jan Burke

This book was a great relief.  I disliked the previous Irene Kelly mystery, Bones, so much that I didn't even review it here or on Goodreads.  I just want to forget it.  I put off starting this one for over a month because I was afraid it would be similarly gruesome and creepy.  But I do aim to read the whole series this year, so I finally started reading Flight, and it was great!  Not creepy.  Whew.

This book actually focuses more on Frank Harriman, Irene Kelly's husband who is a homicide detective.  He's tasked with solving a cold case from 10 years earlier, before he transferred to the Las Piernas PD.  The case involves a homicide detective who was accused of taking a bribe to kill a teen witness in a murder case, and then disappeared.  When his body is found, the case gets assigned to Frank because he's the only detective on the force who wasn't there earlier and doesn't have a preconceived attitude or ideas about it.

Because I happen to love stories of vindicating someone falsely accused of something awful, I totally dug the mystery here.  And even though it's "a novel of suspense" instead of a straight-up mystery (which means there are chapters from the villain's POV), the villain here wasn't super duper creepy like the one in Bones (which was also suspense, not straight mystery), so I didn't have to skip his chapters like I ended up doing with Bones.  

Yay!

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  R for bloody murder, violence against teens, scary situations, and a little more sexual content than Burke usually has.

This is my 46th book read off my TBR shelves for #TheUnreadShelfProject2022.