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No Accident

ebook
1 of 2 copies available
1 of 2 copies available

Good cops have no use for coincidence

When a driver slams his pickup truck—twice—into a tandem bike being ridden by Carlos Guzman and his fiancée, Tasha, in Briones, California, it's more than a simple hit-and-run; the driver clearly intended to harm them. Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman gets the call with the news of her son's accident and wastes no time racing to his side. She is greeted by Police Captain Eddie Mitchell, formerly of Posadas County, who allows Estelle to "consult" on the investigation—but only to a point.

While Carlos struggles with critical injuries, an employee at the bike shop where Carlos bought the tandem is found shot dead in a dumpster—the same man who had borrowed the truck that mowed down Carlos and Tasha. The local cops aren't convinced there's any connection between the two crimes. Not a believer in coincidence, Estelle pursues every possible angle with a cop's determination to solve the case, and a mother's resolve to keep her son safe at any cost.

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    • Kirkus

      January 1, 2022
      Posadas County, New Mexico, Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman investigates a suspicious accident that strikes all too close to home even though it's taken place in another time zone. While they're trying out their new tandem bicycle, Estelle's son Carlos and his fiancee, graphic artist Tasha Qarshe, are struck by a pickup truck. Both of them are seriously injured; Carlos ends up losing his spleen and one of his kidneys. As soon as he gets the news, Carlos' brother, Francisco, a pianist in New York, charters a plane to fly himself and his wife, Angie, to Briones, just east of California's Bay Area, stopping along the way to pick up Estelle and her husband, Dr. Francis Guzman. Working together, detectives from the Contra Costa Sheriff's Department and the Briones Police Department unearth some dismaying news: The truck that hit the bicyclists backed up and hit them again. Far from her New Mexico comfort zone, Estelle has no official standing in the case. But she's given a nametag identifying her as an official police consultant and allowed to ride along with variously congenial officers from both forces as they attempt to trace the movements of the truck, which construction worker James Patrick Wayne loaned his former brother-in-law Stanley Wilke just before it was stolen. The fact that Wilke worked for Todd Stringer in Crosby Cycle Sports, the shop that sold Carlos the bicycle built for two, confirms Estelle's conviction that this accident was no accident. But which of the suspects linked by jealousy or lust to Carlos and Tasha was behind the wheel? It's nice to see the heroine creating family feeling far from home, but the climactic revelation is deeply anticlimactic.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      January 31, 2022
      Havill’s enticing 25th Posadas County mystery (after 2020’s Less than a Moment) finds Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman at the Broken Spur Saloon, where local hothead Johnny Rabke has thrown a billiard ball at a visiting bar patron up from Mexico and knocked him unconscious. While sorting things out with the witnesses and managing the back-talking Rabke, Estelle learns that her younger son, Carlos, has been in a bicycle accident in Briones, Calif. Estelle and her husband travel to Briones, where they discover that Carlos has been badly injured and his girlfriend, Tasha Qarshe, was thrown from the tandem bicycle they were riding together. When it’s revealed that the pickup truck that hit the couple was stolen and had deliberately driven back over Carlos, Estelle realizes that the hit-and-run was intentional, and she begins to investigate with the help of a fingerprint expert from the San Francisco PD. The tension rises as Estelle unravels the jealousies brewing at the local bike shop where Carlos and Tasha spent a lot of their time. The peripheral characters add little to the plot, but fans of the astute Estelle will enjoy the ride.

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