RATING: 4.25Kevin Kerney has traveled a long way over the course of nine books, but he's really settled in very successfully in as the chief of police in the Santa Fe Police Department. He's also a rancher, and the book opens with him traveling to California to buy some horses for himself and his neighbor. When another buyer sharing his living quarters is found dead, Kerney is briefly considered a suspect. Once he's cleared, he's motivated to conduct an investigation of his own; and his department and the local California police enter into a partnership that goes across both their states, since the victim's wife and prime suspect resides in New Mexico.While interviewing those who interacted with the dead man, Clifford Spalding, Kerney finds a Spalding family mystery that goes back 30 years. Spalding's son was killed in Vietnam; but his mother refuses to accept that fact and Kerney begins to believe that she may be on to something, that there's something fishy about the whole situation.Most of the actual police work in the book is done by homicide detectives in New Mexico and California. Although Kerney may direct a lot of the action, he isn't doing much of the nitty gritty work. The focus is less on him and more on secondary characters who are expanding their roles from book to book. The female characters are particularly well developed.The fact that Kerney is the police chief rather than one of the rank-and-file is what makes this police procedural a bit different from its companions on the shelves. As the chief, Kerney is not the lead investigator for any of the cases that come in to the department, but rather the overseer of those who will work the details. At times, he does some investigation, but that is not his raison d'etre. This approach allows McGarrity to spread the narrative out and show several aspects of several investigations at the same time. That led to one weakness in the book for me, an overly ambitious plot with too many lead characters and threads to follow very well. This slowed the pacing and decreased any sense of suspense about the outcome.The Kerney series is a solid body of work, and SLOW KILL a solid entry in the series. I do miss the younger, edgier Kerney; but I guess even our fictional characters have to grow older.
