I’m so glad I came across Eric Rickstad’s police procedurals. He’s very talented. Yes, there’s wokeness but it’s outweighed by this author’s excellent writing. Also, he’s very good at describing family life. Normal, healthy family life. He really, really gets family life, and that makes his characters sound like human beings and not walking cliches.
There’s a sad trend among authors of murder mysteries to depict the policewoman protagonist as a sort of a lousy caricature of a male. These female characters drink themselves into a stupor, have sex with everything that moves, and are terrified of intimacy because of some dark secret in their past. These female characters are so identical that one can’t tell them apart.
Rickstad finally breaks the monotonous chain of these literary policewomen. The main character of Lie in Wait is a mother of two who’s trying for a third baby with her very good husband whom she loves very much. Her very attractive home life creates a great backdrop to the perverted behavior of the criminals she pursues. I have no idea why it took so long for somebody to come up with a female detective who is not a gender-fluid weirdo having sex in public toilets on every other page.
I liked this novel much more than the first book in the series because there are no gruesome scenes and the wokeness is minimal. The novel even arrives at a very Christian message at the end.
Good, good writer.
Clarissa's Blog 
“the policewoman protagonist as a sort of a lousy caricature of a male”
Slightly OT: I recently watched the Indian police procedural series Dahaad and the protagonist is a policewoman who is a boiling cauldron of rage but before long (second episode max) you totally get it. A single woman in a society where the prime directive is ‘get married, already!’ and of low caste (she’s prevented from entering the house of a higher caste family in an early scene) her her anger seems, if anything, a little subdued….
Set in Rajasthan, it’s loosely based on a real case (which happened in a different state) and about the crap that many women face in India, real life or death issues and not the trivial imagined nonsense that western self-absorbed feminists love to obsess over.
It takes a while to start coming together (the police are in no big hurry to care about missing lower caste single women…..) and there are some…. cliches here and there but overall very impressive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahaad
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Thank you for the recommendation! I’ll definitely check it out.
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I loved it too.. though praise from a non-Hindi speaker/non-Indian is a much bigger vote of approval.
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“a non-Hindi speaker”
One of the things I liked was that the language sounded normal. Everyone was speaking Hindi (I presume) with some English loanwords incorporated (again nomral) and an occasional sentence or two in English (when it seemed to make sense).
One of the things that I find very jarring about Bollywood is the weird insertion of English sentences that don’t seem connected to anything going on or being said….
I also liked the look of the series. It looked like it was set in a real place and didn’t have the uncanny valley look of some Indian entertainment.
A year or so ago I also enjoyed Vadhandi, a Tamil procedural with Rashomon elements. The general outlines of what happened are gleaned early but retellings vary and then the final revelations do have a kick I wasn’t expecting.
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