Doug Bateman Mystery, Book 1
Synopsis:
A serial killer is abducting, torturing, and murdering young women in a small community in central Maine. Seeming to select his victims at random, he acts out the rituals of the Spanish Inquisition before committing their bodies to the sacred waters of nearby Sebec Lake. Anne Quinn, an investigator for the Piscataquis County sheriff’s office, and Detective Doug Bateman with the Major Crimes Unit of the Maine State Police join forces in tracking him down. Hiding in plain sight, the killer is clearly from the local community and plays a deadly “catch me if you can” game with Quinn and Bateman. He seems determined to humiliate them and demonstrate his superior intellect, leading them to suspect that perhaps there is a deeper motive and purpose behind his string of murders.
Edition:
E-book
Trigger Warnings:
<span style=”cursor:help;” title=”graphic violence, religiously motivated violence, graphic descriptions of Inquisition torture devices/methods”>Hover for Trigger Warnings</span>
Awards/Nominations:
- Maxy Awards, Best Suspense – Thriller (2017)
My Thoughts:
I love a good serial killer story. Especially when there are elements of religious zealotry involved. And The Ice Maiden has both a serial killer, and the killers crimes have that distinctive religious-insanity twang. And yet.
I can’t say I loved The Ice Maiden. I mean, the premise is A+ – it’s the execution that left me wanting. Doug Bateman and Anne Quinn are probably both very interesting characters. Fascinatingly, although this is Doug Bateman’s series, I feel like I got to know Anne quite a bit better throughout the story (although still admittedly not that well). Smith does a fine job of building scenes, but I feel like they fall a bit short on character development. The dialogue was pretty well written, but there seemed to me to be less time devoted to it than laying out the scene in which it took place. And I understand that scene setting is important, don’t get me wrong. But I also think that the shortest road to strong character development is dialogue. And in an ongoing series with a main character, I feel like that development is sorely needed in book one. And that is where this book kind of lost me.
With that being said though, I can’t stress enough that I did enjoy the story itself very much. The killer was very interesting, and I’m always down for a little history lesson in my murder books. Also, who doesn’t like corpses in ice?
Rating:
Although I wish more attention was paid to character development (and the book was definitely short enough that adding that in would have been pretty easy), The Ice Maiden was just fine. Would I pick up book 2? Probably not. I just wasn’t able to find a connection with Doug Bateman since I felt I still knew nothing about him. But ultimately, I picked this up for free through BookBub so I lost nothing more than an hour or two.
The Ice Maiden Doug Bateman Mystery #1 By B.D. Smith Black Rose Writing Published: April 26, 2017 ISBN: 9781612968629 Hardcover, Paperback, E-book 184 Pages
