Book review: A Final Call, by Eliot Parker
A final call is a detective thriller, 260 pages long
Homicide Detective Stacy Tavitt has too much on her plate. Her delinquent brother is in deep trouble and now he’s gone missing. Is he in danger? Is he dead? And an old college friend has a missing son, Colton, and is counting on Tracy to track him down. But Stacy’s last investigation has left her physically sick and at risk of being invalided out. She has a lot to prove and time isn’t on her side. Nor, it would appear, are some of her colleagues.
At first, there is little reason to suspect foul play in Colton’s disappearance — until he becomes the primary suspect in the brutal murder of an ex-girlfriend.
There are dirty cops in the force and dirty business at every turn. It’s a race against the clock as Stacy searches for the truth about her brother, the location of her friend’s son, and the mystery of a killer who is targeting her friend’s family.
She needs answers, even if she has to break the rules to find them. This time it’s personal.
This is very much a police procedure story. Early in the story, they have a main suspect, and most of the book is dedicated to finding this suspect.
We follow the homicide detective Stacy Tavitt, whose brother is missing. His disappearance seems to be related to the homicide she faces and the different people they contact or interrogate.
Tavitt misuses her authority to find her brother. This is something I think most people can understand and forgive, at least when it is fiction.
I enjoyed the story until I got halfway. Then there was a scene that totally change my experience of the book.
She and her partner, together with a SWAT team, overtake a house. There they find a young man they want information from. To get this, Tavitt beats him. If this was something her partner had objected to, something discussed, something she regretted, it could have been part of the conflict and a character arc.
It was not.
No one commented on the beating and by Tavitt experience she had done it before. It felt natural to her — though have moved halfway through the story, without this attitude shining through. She knew what she was doing and it was not a single act of madness.
She abused and tricked a suspect to talk, without reading him his rights and getting what he said on any record. And no one reacts or comments on it. I was appalled and disgusted. Also, in times when the police force many times have used too much force, it is totally unnecessary to make this kind of behavior okay.
When Tavitt later in the book gets into trouble for using her position to find her brother, I just wished she would lose her job, because I no longer considered her a good police detective.
Apart from this massive blunder, the book is well written and has a good flow in the story. There were also some funny side stories about her mother and a man in her life that gave a rather dark story a few smiles. It was not the most exciting story I have read detective-wise, but the police procedures felt genuine and showed several interesting issues with finding someone who has disappeared. I kept reading, wanting to know how it would end.
