Thanks to the awesome @Scintilla_Info Scintilla.info for agreeing to be on my Blog Tour and for such an insightful review of Vile City (shown below).
Why not stop by her wonderful website?
Mystery: Detective in a Coma: Vile City, Detective in a Coma Book 1, Jennifer Lee Thomson
Blog Tour February 18, 2022
Detective Inspector Duncan Waddell has his hands full. A wave of burglaries in Glasgow has targeted the elderly. Two young women have gone missing, and a report has just come in about a third victim. He is training his new partner, DC Brian McKeith. He and his wife are raising their children. It is no wonder that he visits and talks often with his former partner.
His former partner, DC Stevie Campbell, is lying comatose in the hospital, with no sign that he will ever recover enough to wake up. Stabbed by a criminal with a broken bottle, he now lies inert, fed intravenously, turned regularly to prevent bedsores. Waddell visits him, shares details of cases with him, jokes with him and reads to him, hoping against hope that he can somehow hear him despite there being no evidence of this.
Until the day that Stevie sits up and talks to him! Except, no one else can see him. There is no medical sign that he ever moved, no one else heard him, and when the nurses come into the room to check on him he is as deep in his coma as ever. Only Duncan can hear him.
Did we mention how much pressure DI Waddell has been under?
Jennifer Lee Thomson’s plot is intense. Kidnapped women, sex trafficking, rape and other kinds of violence. The “Vile” part of the title Detective in a Coma: Vile City definitely lives up to its placement. Waddell tries very hard to shelter his family from the ugliness he sees every day. When he comes home, though, he has to take a long, hot shower to wash away both the grime on his body and the darkness in his spirit before he can trust himself to spend time with his children and his wife. It is a perilous internal struggle, one that he has mastered but which takes an awful toll on him.
"DI Waddell is committed to bringing in some light where he can."
I cannot say enough about Thomson’s painting of this protagonist. He is a good man facing a lot of evil but determined to make a difference. He loves and protects his family, he visits and talks with his fallen friend, and he manages to see the positives in DC McKeith despite an occasionally intense desire to kick him back to handing out parking tickets. Glasgow seems to have many dark corners. DI Waddell is committed to bringing in some light where he can.
