Review – Fear No Evil

Officer Lincoln Vailes gets more than he bargained for when he answers a domestic disturbance call at his small town’s women’s shelter. He finds a drunken husband demanding return of his wife and daughter, with diminutive social worker Jade Laurent angrily blocking the door. The husband leaves, but not without a threat against Jade. The apparently resolved situation dissolves into mystery when someone deliberately bumps Jade’s car off the road, injuring her shoulder, and the suspected husband can’t be found.

Then Jade is the intended victim in an overt assassination attempt that puts the daughter of the violent husband in the hospital and leaves the apparent assassin dead from a sniper’s bullet. Evidence points to urban gang involvement, raising the question of what, in Jade’s apparently innocent past, would give her a relationship with gang warfare. Lincoln’s attempt to solve the crimes leads into ever-deepening mystery, increasing emotional entanglement with Jade, growing peril, and an inevitably violent climax.

Into this main narrative set in a small town, Robin Caroll weaves a parallel plot of urban gang warfare in far-away Philadelphia. The gang leader, Guerrero, must decide whether attacks on his gang come from a rival gang or from the Mafia, and he then must decide the appropriate form of violent response. Despite the apparent disparity of the two plots, the author deftly brings them together at the novel’s climax. Nor is her skill limited to that. She has thoroughly researched her materials, from police and medical procedures to weather to weapons capabilities to the inner workings of urban gangs. Her span of subjects includes domestic violence, the tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease, the agony of dealing with grief, and maintaining Christian faith in the presence of pain and evil. Each of her major characters has a well-developed history, and each is haunted by personal ghosts that must be exorcised.

The result is an exceptionally well-plotted and readable novel that will keep readers turning pages far into the night.