****Easy Errors

Auto Crash

photo: Marcus Sümnick, creative commons license

By Steven F. Havill – This is book 22 in Havill’s Posadas County (New Mexico) mystery series and is a prequel to the  earlier books.

Demonstrating how reader opinion is more than background noise to crime fiction writers, Havill says Easy Errors sprang from a reader’s request for more information about Sheriff Robert Torrez’s early career. It’s a testament to how well Havill knows and understands his characters inside and out that he can reach back in time and conjure their younger selves.

Havill begins this book, narrated in the first person by Undersheriff Bill Gastner, with Gastner relaxing one Wednesday night (with a book!), interrupted in the third paragraph with “the distant shriek of tires tearing rubber and the loud, dull whump that followed.” A motor vehicle has crashed disastrously somewhere nearby, so Gastner alerts the sheriff’s dispatcher and sets out to find the source of the noise.

It isn’t pretty.

What follows over the next few days is the meticulous reconstruction of events that led to this tragedy. You might think an auto crash could not sustain investigative—and reader—attention for an entire novel, but Havill’s skill lies in making this police procedural absolutely riveting. It proves that a crime story doesn’t have to trot out a demented serial killer or imperil the US President and all of Congress in order to have stakes worth caring about.

Each of Havill’s characters is intrinsically interesting, and it’s equally interesting to see how they work together as a team, which includes working around some spotty (and humorous) assistance from the police dispatchers.

The care that Havill takes in reconstructing the crime and establishing the officers’ logic in developing every last bit of evidence holds until near the book’s end, when the author has the prosecutor, speaking before the grand jury, claim a type of evidence the authorities do not actually possess. While the grand jury might reach the same decision with or without this information, its decision is based on a totality of evidence, and the total is flawed. In a novel so thoroughly grounded in the step-by-step accretion of facts, this slip-up is jarring, and the book’s title, Easy Errors, turns ironic.

Still, the rest of the book is so strong, this mistake isn’t enough to discourage me from wanting to read more Posadas County mysteries. As a fan of the Longmire tv series, based on Craig Johnson’s books, I warmed to this one immediately.