Marilyn's Mystery Reads

Book Author: Bruce Borgos

It’s Shiloah Roy’s seventeenth birthday, and her father is giving her the big party he wants her to have despite her wishes for something smaller for her friends only.  But a man in his position, Jesse Roy reasons, needs to show off not simply his only child but also his own incredible wealth.  Thus the party for more than a hundred guests, featuring fireworks and a catered dinner, is in full swing when a fireball, not part of the massive fireworks display Roy ordered, lands in the middle of his ranch.

The following morning Sheriff Porter Beck receives a visit from Special Agent Ed Maddox, Office of Special Investigations.  He won’t tell Beck why he’s come to the high desert plains of Nevada but insists that the sheriff come with him to the Double J Ranch, site of the mysterious fireball.  There Maddox interviews Jesse, who is looking for an answer to explain what happened the previous evening when a government aircraft landed on and killed his most expensive steer.  Maddox isn’t able to explain exactly how the aircraft came to destroy the bull, but he doesn’t balk at agreeing to reimburse Jesse $100,000 for the dead animal.                     .

When Beck and Maddox leave the ranch, a livestock trailer enters, and Jesse and his foreman watch as the heifers are unloaded.  As soon as the trailer is empty, they lift up its floorboards to show hundreds of guns–semiautomatic rifles, pistols, and revolvers.  The weapons are headed to Mexico, and this is obviously not the first time such a trip has been made.

After Beck and Maddox return to the former’s home, the agent reluctantly explains that one of the government’s planes was highjacked the previous night and rerouted to kill Roy’s bull.  Maddox asks Beck to keep his eyes open.  What Beck doesn’t tell the agent is that he and Jesse go back a long way.  They were childhood friends, but over the years the two men have gone their separate ways.

The following day Beck and his father, the former sheriff of Lincoln County, drive to Snow Canyon to see Brin Cummings, Beck’s adopted sister.  She is the firearms expert on a movie shooting there, and Beck fills her in on the previous day’s happenings at the Double J.  Brin tells her brother that she knows Shiloah Roy, since the teenager is a volunteer at the Lincoln County Youth Center, where she herself is a part-time counselor.

Almost as an aside Brin mentions that Shiloah is very friendly with one of the young women at the Center, a “member” as the incarcerated teenagers are called.  She describes Mercy Vaughn as possibly “the smartest kid I’ve ever met.”  When Beck meets her, he’s inclined to agree, and he and Mercy begin working together to understand how the government plane had been taken over the night before and deliberately crashed into Roy’s ranch.

Beck is also facing two local issues–fires breaking out all over the county due to the hot, dry weather and two deaths from drug overdoses.  It’s a lot for the sheriff’s small department to deal with, and Beck will need the help of Brin, Mercy, and his staff to find the solutions to all of these issues.

Bruce Borgos has written a novel that expertly combines realistic characters, a swiftly moving plot, and a dramatic landscape that all work to make Shades of Mercy a fascinating read.  You can read more about the author at this website.

Check out the complete Marilyn’s Mystery Reads at her website.  In addition to book review posts, there are sections featuring Golden Oldies, Past Masters and Mistresses, and an About Marilyn column that features her opinions about everything to do with mystery novel.

Depending on how one views it, the High Desert is either an area of great beauty or a desolate landscape. Its very small population is spread over a very large area, and it definitely takes a certain type of mindset to live there.

Porter Beck is the sheriff of Lincoln County, Nevada, which is part of the High Desert, as was his father before him.  Murders there are rare, but now he is faced with a particularly heinous one.  The murdered man was Ralph Atterbury, a retired FBI agent, and he was brutally tortured, apparently for hours, before his death.

Beck, as everyone calls him, served in an Intelligence unit in the Army.  Now he thinks, “It’s a level of torture I’ve never witnessed, and that includes what I’ve seen the Taliban do.”  He has one of his deputies call the FBI office in Las Vegas to inform them of the crime and continues his search of Atterbury’s home, one thing standing out from all the blood and butchery.  It’s a small box containing Thallium salts, which Beck recognizes from a past experience.  Very, very poisonous, odorless, and tasteless.

The next day FBI Agent Sana Locke enters Beck’s office.  Together they return to the scene of the crime and afterward to the Las Vegas field office to view Atterbury’s corpse.

Then The Bitter Past goes back to 1955, when Las Vegas was a newly emerging vacation spot and fears of the Cold War were everywhere.   A young man called Freddie Meyer gets an interim job as a dealer in one of the city’s casinos, and there he meets Katherine Ellison.  The two click immediately, and after a few dates she takes him home to meet her father, a physicist working on a secret weapon who has ultra-high security clearance.

The two men hit it off, partly due to Freddie’s interest in and knowledge of physics, and Dr. Ellison is able to get Freddie a job as a security guard at the newly named Nevada Testing Site.  Although he passed the security clearance for this position, the reader knows there’s something “off” about Freddie.

Why is he so determined to learn all he can about his fellow guards?  Why does he downplay his ability with firearms?  And, given his relatively low status as a security guard, why is he aiming to obtain as much information as he can about the science of atomic testing?

Four weeks into his new job Freddie has a few days off and leaves the testing site, returning to his Las Vegas apartment.  Picking up his mail, he sees a small package from his Aunt Sally.  When he opens it, inside is the camera he is expecting.  It will permit Freddie, also known as Lieutenant Georgiy Dudko of the Committee for State Security (KGB), to take photos without being observed, inside the United States’ most secret facility.

Bruce Borgos has written a mystery with multiple layers.  Its protagonist, Porter Beck, is charming, funny, and a lawman with incredible credentials, and the book’s other characters bring their own strengths and personalities to the novel.  The Bitter Past is an outstanding debut, and I hope to see much more of Beck and his colleagues in the future.

You can read more about the author at this website.