The Memory Man (A Eurocrimes Thriller) (An Ash and Varg Thriller)

by Steven Savile

[Jeff Sexton]

Excellent Memory. This is the first book in a new police mystery series, centered on a Eurocrimes Division with authority and agents spread throughout Europe, including a United Kingdom in the midst of the Brexit split. It is intensely dark - we open with a politician being tortured and murdered, and it really doesn't get any brighter from there. But also very good - I'm no fan of cops (being American and seeing what they get away with here), but Ash and Varg are shown to be good people approaching the case from different perspectives with the same end goal: solve the crime, period. Truly one of the best mysteries I've read in quite a while, and the dark and grit is one of the reasons for this. Yes, the reader gets a sense early on of what the scope of the mystery likely is, but the way Savile pulls it all together and throws in just enough reveals along the way, with nearly earth shattering (and so very tragic if based on anything remotely similar in real life) reveals in the last 10%, certainly for our heroes. There is enough backstory to both Ash and Varg that could merit a few prequel books, and there is enough potential here that by the end of the book, when the two *finally* meet, this reader was genuinely hoping for a Book 2.