Thursday, November 23, 2023

The Bitter Past

Title: The Bitter Past
Author: Bruce Borgos
Published: July 18, 2023 by Minotaur Books
Format: Hardcover, 320 Pages
Genre: Police Procedural
Series: Porter Beck #1

First Paragraph: We don’t have a lot of murder in Lincoln County. The long stretches of open road provide us with more than our share of high-speed vehicular deaths, the images of which can haunt your dreams, but there just isn’t a lot of people killing other people on purpose. When we do encounter it, it’s never like this. This is something from hell.

Blurb: Porter Beck is the sheriff in the high desert of Nevada, north of Las Vegas. Born and raised there, he left to join the Army, where he worked in Intelligence, deep in the shadows in far off places. Now he's back home, doing the same lawman's job his father once did, before his father started to develop dementia. All is relatively quiet in this corner of the world, until an old, retired FBI agent is found killed. He was brutally tortured before he was killed and clues at the scene point to a mystery dating back to the early days of the nuclear age. If that wasn't strange enough, a current FBI agent shows up to help Beck's investigation.

In a case that unfolds in the past (the 1950s) and the present, it seems that a Russian spy infiltrated the nuclear testing site and now someone is looking for that long-ago, all-but forgotten person, who holds the key to what happened then and to the deadly goings on now. (GoodReads)

My Opinion: I am not sure how I first stumbled upon this book. Initially, I passed it up, but eventually, I felt it was the right time to read it. I regret not having read it earlier since Bruce Borgos is an excellent storyteller who keeps the reader hooked with the right balance of plotting and storytelling. Although he has been compared to Craig Johnson, his approach and style are distinct.

The book has elements of US history and family past, but it is in the last quarter of the book where an unexpected twist will captivate the reader. This twist caught me off guard, and I was engrossed in the book until the last page.

The second book in the series, "Shade of Mercy," is set to release next summer, and it is already on my wish list.

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