Day One

"Set in Portland, Ore., Cameron's richly flavored if contrived third crime novel opens with what looks like a familiar urban domestic crisis. But when battered ex-cop Skin Kadash, last seen in Chasing Smoke (2008), scans the crowd gathered outside the house in his neighborhood where a man supposedly has gone berserk and pulled a gun on his family, Skin recognizes the teenage skateboarder who was the sole witness to an unsolved Jane Doe murder a few years before — and so begins wondering whether the two outbursts of violence could be related. Like Skin, readers may become obsessed with making unlikely connections, as the book offers a montage of narrative fragments from different times and viewpoints, interspersed with 'objective' but semi-informed newspaper reports. The characters' operatically intense passions are powerful, but the extreme coincidences underlying the plot weaken the overall impact. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)