Book Review: Damaged Souls

Reviewed by David Steven Rappoport on Windy City Reviews.

Ultimately, there are two kinds of detective novels: compelling and complacent. Damaged Souls by Sandra M. Colbert is a heart-pounder. This story of a horrible crime and its impact is a highly enjoyable read.  It will keep you on the beach compulsively turning the pages long past the protection of your SPF lotion. 

Damaged Souls is the second novel in the Kate Harrison detective series, and it is far better crafted than the first.  After many years on the Phoenix police force, Kate is haunted by a particularly dark crime, the murder of an infant, and as a result has left her job. She has relocated to the northern Illinois town of Harley, where she is on a Chicago commuter train when a man is discreetly murdered.  Although she doesn’t know the victim, he knows her; in fact, he’s left multiple messages on her cell phone. Thus, the murders begin in this gnarled tale of a crime wrongly then correctly solved.  It is the sort of depraved saga that even a Jacobean theatergoer would appreciate—pitiless revenge, drug-induced insanity, pervasive corruption, sexual enslavement, and desperate fear, among other tragic delights—and the emotional slashes that result from all these that cannot be forgotten or removed. No one in this novel has been spared a damaged soul.

Colbert is on her way to mastering the crime genre. The prose is lean and driven, the plot is forceful, and transitions in time and place are handled with ease. The characters are well-delineated and distinct. There is, perhaps, one formal element of the book that might trouble the purist.  That is the resolution of a romantic subplot, which, though written convincingly, continues long past the resolution of the crime. But this is a relatively minor matter and may even be enjoyable for the reader who reads crime fiction for character as much as plot. 

Damaged Souls is a deliciously dark crime novel that any reader who enjoys this genre will savor.  I look forward to the next book in the series—and the one after that.