Johnson's Subgenre Novel may only be Interesting to her Subgenre

Cold Flash - Carrie H. Johnson

The world of mystery fiction seems to be becoming more and more fragmented. Once there were mostly police procedurals, courtroom dramas, and PI mysteries; then along came a slew of new genres like cozy, romantic, profession-based, and supernatural tales. Next came the sub-genres and sub-sub genres and maybe even sub-sub-sub-genres. It seems that somewhere out there, an author has concocted a mystery with a hero(ine) exactly like the reader – no matter whether that reader is male, female, Anglo, Latino, African-American, gay, straight, vampire, alien… you get the picture. In the rush to fill every available niche, however, quality seems to have taken a back seat to quality. I hate to say it, but Carrie H. Johnson and Cold Flash are a perfect example.

Johnson’s written a police procedural with a middle-aged African-American woman as the lead cop. Muriel Mabley’s her name, and forensics is her game – specifically firearms expertise. As befits a female protagonist, she has a romantic interest and a tight support group of other women (also African-American). Although a veteran cop, her job is mainly lab work – though for some reason she, much like characters in a "CSI" franchise, spends an inordinate amount of time at crime scenes… except, for some reason, the crime scenes seem to happen around her!

Mabley’s young son Travis (who’s really her nephew) has a new friend, a kid about his age (twenty) named Elijah. His big brother is a principle in “Berg Nation,” a powerful local gang (Philly, if anyone cares). Berg Nation is flooding the ‘hood with fentanyl-laced heroin, and people are dying everywhere. Mabley’s best friend Dulcey’s husband Hampton Dangervil is hiding from loan sharks who want to collect on a gambling debt, and someone killed a cop. It all seems related to the heroin trade

Muriel’s man Calvin, who runs a neighborhood club that intends to keep kids out of gangs, is on the hunt for the source of the deadly white stuff. Muriel bounces back and forth between boinking Calvin; hunting for Travis (and his friends); trying to reconnect with her sister Nareece, who just came out of a catatonic state; and trying to keep Hamp for being slaughtered for not paying up. And yet people just keep dying all around her – even to the point of Mabley coincidentally finding the body of a friend of Travis floating in the Schuylkill River while swimming.

Of course, Muriel will figure it all out – but not before the great final twist… I’ve always thought that coincidences are the poor author’s crutch, but for Cold Flash it appears that Johnson had a pair: never have I run across a novel with more tropes from the world of soap operas that this one. You’ve got your “adopted the kid sister’s bastard kid” trope, your “yes I’m married but my wife’s in a coma” trope, even a form of the old “amnesia” trope. And that’s just this novel – in the first installment (Hot Flash), Muriel found out that her lover/partner Laughton was the half-brother of her sister’s baby daddy (whom Muriel killed in a shootout).

People show up out of nowhere to save Mabley’s ass when she’s trapped, the head of a powerful crime family reaches out for help, the big gang leader is a teenager, the missing lover suddenly reappears out of nowhere – all lazy writing. Mabley’s great love gets killed and within a few pages she’s doing the horizontal bop with another guy – not even a few minutes of grief! Characters just show up on one page and are found dead on the next. And Johnson insists on giving directions to her settings – including an  actual address at one point – and dropping the names of local eateries, etc.


This is a novel that lacks a decent plot, and that’s perhaps its best quality! The characters are ragged and lack any emotional content. The overabundance of cheap plot points and over-reliance on coincidences render Cold Flash almost unreadable. Give it a pass.

copyright © 2017 scmrak