Killers Beware: Waterman and Stark are on the Scene

The Girl in the Woods – Gregg Olsen

When it comes to mysteries, the people who investigate crimes for a living pretty much break down into three categories: cops (think Harry Bosch), medical examiners (Kay Scarpetta) and criminalists (Lincoln Rhyme). Those are the protagonists whose investigations are lumped together as police procedurals. Scarpetta and her fellow Quincys now have a new colleague: Birdy Waterman of Kitsap County, Washington. Birdy’s a member of the Makah, a Native American tribe local to the area. Birdy and Detective Kendall Stark make up the investigative team of Waterman and Stark, featured in Gregg Olsen’s series of the same name. The Girl in the Woods (2014) is the first of three, so far, novels in the series.

The eponymous girl’s first appearance is a bit part – the bit being one of her feet. Birdy’s investigation of the found foot is only just underway when a dirt biker comes across the remainder of the body. The girl was only sixteen, and to make matters worse, she and her mother were the only survivors of a traffic accident that killed her father and brother. As a result, Mom became a hoarder.

Meanwhile on the other side of town, a young nurse’s aide is certain that the once-handsome and –vital former naval officer next door has been murdered by his new wife. As luck would have it, Birdy quickly realizes that the gorgeous young widow and her equally gorgeous daughter (but less-gorgeous son) are hiding something. Sure enough, he’d been poisoned. Is there a “black widow” on the loose? Wonder of wonders, the two murders are revealed to be connected by a tenuous thread – they’re tangentially related to convicted murderer Brenda Nevins, the “most beautiful prisoner in America.” That means Kendall will have to interview the woman in a scene right out of “Orange Is the New Black”… and, of course, there will be the usual heart-pounding climactic showdown with the murderous villain. Of course.

Olsen’s red herrings are pretty faded (more of pink herrings) and his plot twist so hackneyed that I could see it a couple hundred pages in advance. The mechanism by which the two killings are connected is so clumsy that it’s almost laughable. Considering that Waterman is a coroner / medical examiner, there’s surprisingly little about the science of the autopsy suite (the text doesn’t even mention instars when talking about “maggots”). On the other hand, the characters – including the dead girl’s mother and the protagonists – are fairly well-crafted, although Olsen seems to lay the family drama on a little thick when it comes to Waterman.

As far as mysteries are concerned, The Girl in the Woods would only merit two stars – especially since the character of Brenda Nevins owes her very existence to Chelsea Cain’s Gretchen Lowell – but Olsen manages to drag it up to average with a fairly good sense of place and some interesting characters. In reality, though, the novel is about what you’d expect for a debut novel. The only problem with this observation is, according to the “other works by the author” list, that it’s his eighteenth.

copyright © 2016 scmrak