Book Review
Labyrinth (FBI Series #23)
By Catherine Coulter
Gallery Books © 2019
Labyrinth is a Savich and Sherlock thriller.
Agent Lacey Sherlock is involved in a car accident on a dark road in Washington D.C. As she is hit, her car flies out of control, a man smashes against her windshield and runs away from the scene of the crash. Sherlock is knocked unconscious and wakes up in the hospital, unable to remember who she is. Trying to find herself and her memory, she works with Dillon Savich, the husband and father of her young son of whom she has no recollection, to find the victim of her crash. Why did he run? DNA tests show him to be a CIA Analyst at Langley. What is he hiding?
At the same time, Agent Ben Hammersmith rescues a woman who has been kidnapped in a small town, Gaffer’s Ridge, Virginia. The pair escape the kidnapper and call the police. In a small community, all are interrelated, and in this community, the kidnapper is the local sheriff’s nephew. Battling small-town politics, the pair must get to the bottom of a local mystery involving missing women and their connection to the Sherriff’s family.
The two stories are paced side-by-side and do intertwine slightly, in that Sherlock and Savich make an appearance in Gaffer’s Ridge to assert the power of the FBI and help Hammersmith take control of his investigation. Aside from this brief interaction and a few phone conversations, each story is completely separated.
The book teaser suggests this book is full of shocking twists and turns. It is supposed to be full of white-knuckle pacing to keep the reader engaged. I am not so sure. Each mystery could be expanded to stand on its own as a fine story with little effort. Flipping back and forth between stories was a source of frustration to me. I found it difficult to be engaged and involved with each story, as it rotated too often to be truly absorbing.
I am a fan of seemingly unrelated stories which intertwine to a surprising finale. Jeffery Deaver’s The Cutting Edge throws off his readers with this surprising twist. In Labyrinth, the two seemingly unrelated cases are just that – completely unrelated. For a book that is almost 500 pages in length, I found this to begin to make the stories somewhat tedious. Perhaps readers of The FBI series enjoy the length of the book because they are invested in the continuation of the character development.
I must confess, this was my first FBI series mystery, so I was not familiar with the characters to date. Catherine Coulter has built up a world in which readers must start from earlier stories, as her character base is now so diverse and the stories so intricate, it is difficult to pick up on all of these characters in book 23. The way she writes her characters takes for granted the reader is already familiar with each of them.
I am a Jonathan Kellerman fan. I have read over 30 Alex Delaware novels, but I find those reoccurring characters to be easier to grasp. I began reading Alex Delaware stories at book 16, without too much trouble understanding each character and their relationship to Alex Delaware. The same cannot be said for the characters in Catherine Coulter’s FBI Series.
Recommendation
My opinion, if you are already familiar with Catherine Coulter and this series, you will most likely enjoy this book very much. If not, I would pass on this one or start from book 1, The Maze.