Juggling murder with motherhood

The Dead Room
Chris Mooney
Penguin
415 pages
Rs560

Fancy a few hours with Darby McCormick? The lady is a doctorate and a trained SWAT operative, your average police inspector, but fighting fit for a seemingly endless range of criminal emergencies. Armed with pugnacious instincts and a somewhat out-of-control fury, Darby can make Bond look pansy. 

Fresh and yet to recover from her extreme training, Detective McCormick is thrown headlong into a case of a woman tortured to death in front of her son. The boy wants to speak to Detective McCormick; only, it’s not Darby he is looking for, but her patrolman father who died a few years ago.

The meeting ends badly, with the boy shooting himself, and leaving Darby with too many questions. What is the mystery surrounding the surprise attack? Is Darby’s father really the patrolman she knew him as? Why exactly did he die?

As action thrillers go, this one, with its short chapters and not one but two women action heroes, is a racy filler for your jaded palates. Just don’t go by the blurb, “Chris Mooney will teach you about fear.” Well, he won’t. At least not anything you don’t know already, especially if you are a fan of action thrillers.

But who said thrillers had to be scary? This thriller is mostly about revenge. While Detective McCormick pursues the truth behind her father’s death, unknown to her, another woman, Jamie, whose husband was murdered before her eyes, is juggling murder with motherhood.

As mom to Carter and Michael, her sons who underwent extensive medical procedures to survive the attack on their home, Jamie’s every move is fraught with the classic conundrum: fight or flight? The fatal attack on her husband is sealed in Jamie’s memory of The Dead Room, where she too will face a similar predicament in the course of the revenge drama.