ALL IS NOT FORGIVEN

“The story and its characters are made up, mostly,” indicates Kenda in a headnote to this distantly fact-based crime yarn set in 1975. Both the acknowledgment and its casual tone are entirely apt.

When Dallas heiress Kathryn Montgomery is shot dead with six soft wadcutter bullets in her plush Colorado Springs home, suspicion naturally falls on her husband. Fred Montgomery, who’s enjoyed limited success as an expert witness on engineering matters, ducks the initial questions of Det. Lee Wilson and his rookie partner, Det. Joe Kenda, shows up for a second attempt with a high-priced lawyer and presents an alibi—he was in Las Vegas causing such a ruckus that the security detail at the Whitehorse Casino kept a constant eye on him—that’s too good to be true. And Wilson and Kenda are quite correct: Montgomery hired pathologically sadistic freelance killer Bruno Kleiss, if that’s his real name, to rid himself of his inconvenient wife and reopen the tap she’d shut off to her money. So where’s the mystery? It partly concerns the figure of retired SAS Capt. Laurence Haywood, another hired killer, who’s been pulled out of his second retirement and sent to Colorado on an unspecified errand, and partly concerns the question of just how many anecdotes, digressions, and flips back and forth between Kenda’s first-person narrative and the third-person narrative that covers developments outside his ken the author will cram in. Readers inclined to skip over the padding will be left with a story that’s neither substantial nor mysterious but one that Kenda keeps moving right along.

Chatty, meandering, and intermittently gruesome. Now there’s a combination you rarely see.