A murder mystery that involves Geocaching – what more could I ask for, right? And actually this book was pretty good until the last few pages. For anyone who doesn’t know, geocaching is where people hide a container and post the coordinates on the geocaching website for people to find. Some hides are pretty straight-forward, while others are tricky and require thought and ingenuity. It happens to be a hobby I am pretty active in.
Cliff Knowles is a newly retired FBI agent, coping with the death of his wife and his newfound idleness by taking up a new hobby – geocaching. While searching for a cache, he comes across skeletal remains. Soon, a second, more recent victim is found near another geocache Cliff recently found. It turns out there is a connection between him and the first victim, and soon suspicion is focused on him. Cliff must try to find out who the owner of the caches is, as well as what is happening and why he has been drawn into it.
I found Cached Out to be well-written as a mystery. I enjoyed the references to geocaching and the details of his finds, but even if you’re not into geocaching, it’s a decent mystery on its own. The pace is fast as events move along and propel the story. He gives enough information to keep the reader guessing and interested in what will happen, with some geocaching thrown in. You don’t need to be a geocacher to enjoy the book. I really couldn’t figure out the entire picture until the very end when it was revealed and the revelation was a surprising one.
SPOILERS AHEAD
I can’t talk about why I ended up hating the book and giving it a one-star rating on Goodreads without spoiling the ending. I don’t know what to think of the author, Russell Atkinson. Reading his biography, he was an FBI Special Agent for 25 years. Obviously once he retired he decided to become a writer. I felt that the character of Clifford Knowles is a bit him inserting himself into the story. There’s nothing wrong with that – many authors do that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Here, everything was fine.
Until I reached his 10 months later chapter.
You see, the killer’s motivation was poisoning drugs that were being sold to addicts to try to force them to give up their addiction as a way of reducing other crimes. If a few addicts die along the way, so what? The goal is to make them afraid to buy drugs; that they risk dying from getting a poisoned batch. If a few (or many) die along the way, then so what? They’re only drug addicts anyway and hardly worth being concerned about.
It’s okay for a villain to think that way, but Atkinson seems to make a case for this in his 10 month follow-up. He makes the case that crime is way down in an area of California where “overdoses” are up – only they aren’t really overdoses as the drugs were laced with something else. In fact, he describes the protagonist of the story “walking away smiling” when he puts it all together that a certain person is still out there doing this.
It makes me question his career as an FBI agent, that he puts to paper that a “good guy” is okay with this, especially when the character seems to be modeled after himself.
I cannot recommend anything written in this vein. I lost my own child to suicide due to drug addiction. All those people he seems to think deserve to die because they are addicts have people who love them. They are children, parents, siblings, etc. of people who love and care about them. They are not mindless, faceless people who deserve to die because they have a disease known as addiction.
I will stay far away from anything written by Russell Atkinson in the future.
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Categories: Book Reviews, Geocaching
That author is definitely not one that I would like to support by buying his books.
I’m a Kennedy-type liberal, not a Sanders-style one, which means that I have a few conservative traits in my political DNA. That’s one of the reasons why I loved the books of Tom Clancy; he (and Jack Ryan) were conservative, but they were not sadists.
This dude might have been an LEO, but he has a streak of nastiness inside. Ugh.
I have some conservative traits too (surprise, surprise). I think the people who want to “defund” the police are misguided. That’s probably a whole other review. But yeah, I read that last chapter and was like “WHAT THE FUCK” – sanctioning a “final solution” for drug addicts. And he was an FBI agent?
I think “defund the police” is a patently stupid phrase, partly because it is absolutely the wrong word for what its saner proponents are really suggesting.
As I understand it, the real idea (and I don’t know how it can be implemented in reality) is not that communities will abolish law enforcement agencies, but rather not fund the “militarization” of police by funneling money that was intended to purchase surplus military equipment for police use into other, equally important programs that can address some of the underlying roots of crime and criminal activity “Defunding” is not a good term, because conservatives pounce on it like cats on catnip and say, “See, the Dems want to get rid of cops.”
This “Dem” has no such wish.
Do I favor the re-distribution of funds earmarked for surplus military equipment purchases by police? I’m on the fence about it. Why? Because I simply do not know if it would do any good either way. I don’t like bullies in uniform. But I don’t like the notion of outgunned good cops slaughtered by well-armed bad guys either.
As for the author….well, I have always thought that every profession has its share of evil people in it. In journalism, it’s people like Rupert Murdoch, Alex Jones, and the right-wingers that run Sinclair, the company that owns quite a few TV stations and are going to air that crappy Plandemic faux documentary. I especially dislike Murdoch; he had always sought to be a conservative king-maker for both his ego and financial gain.That’s why he co-created Fox News with the late, disgusting Roger Ailes.
There are plenty of “bad guys” in government and the military. The author of that novel sure seems to be one of those.
I’m with you on that – demilitarize the police. They are supposed to protect and serve – not treat the public like the enemy. There are some people who think that if the police weren’t there everything would be hunky dory and people would all be nice and sing kumbaya. I know that’s not the case; I know we need law enforcement. However, we do not need a SWAT team to respond to a suicidal person barricaded inside their home (true story, that was one of the former managers at the hotel I worked at.)
As for this guy, I wanted to make sure that people understand what he seems to be a proponent of. I know some people are perfectly fine with that. I don’t want to be friends with anyone like that.