Guest Review: Past Sins by Thomas Grant Bruso

Officer Jack Ballinger receives a phone call from the chief of police in the early morning hours regarding a dead body at an apartment building in a quiet neighborhood in the small upstate New York town of Black Falls. A female student lies in a pentagram outlined in her own blood, clutching a rosary. Ballinger and his former partner Officer Cory Ryan interview tenants in the building about the girl’s death, but are met with more questions than answers.

When another body is found in the same apartment building a few hours later, Jack knows something is wrong. As he ciphers through a patchwork of unexplainable clues, the investigation detours when Ryan disappears from the case and cannot be found.

With his future as an officer in question, will Ballinger be able to deal with the truth of these crimes once he dscovers everything he thought he knew was a lie?

Reviewer: Annery

In Greek mythology Sirens were beautiful creatures who lured sailors with their song only to shipwreck their vessels. The blurb and cover of this book were that call for me. Sadly the results were the same for me. I crashed hard. *cue sad face*

I seem to be on a collision course with bad stuff lately, however there’s no way forward but trying new writers. The dreaded First Person Present Tense, along with the writer/editor’s weird fixation on breaking each sentence into a new paragraph were my first clues that things weren’t going to go well.

Here’s an example:

“I turn to my former partner Officer Cory Ryan, twenty-nine, bisexual, dark-skinned and a Patriot’s fan, writing furiously in his notebook ten feet from me in the fare corner.” A falling out between us last year led us to working with different partners on separate cases. I blame Ryan’s mood swings and lack of patience and professionalism, and the way he handles cases, walking away from interviews and not speaking to me for days later. Six years separate us, and I miss the time we spent together, drinking beer and watching college and professional football games at a bar after work. I stop thinking about our past, as a booming crash of thunder shifts my position, and I jump, startled, and let out a soft yelp.”

As you can surmise, a whole book like this can be a chore, and as you saw there’s boatloads of infodump which ultimately bring nothing to the story. This could be overcome if it weren’t for the MC, Jack Ballinger, weren’t pretty much incompetent as a Police Officer, scared of his own shadow (*see yelping above*), and not particularly likable, if you go by how he treats his bedmate, or how he describes and refers to others.

The coup de grâs of course is police procedural plot written by someone who perhaps has gotten their ideas from bad tv cop shows. To say there’s zero verisimilitude to actual police work or cases would be kind. I won’t belabor the whole plot, preposterous in the sequence of events, resolution, and Jack’s role in it. Also for those still reading, this isn’t really a romance. I can’t recommend this.

Sorry.