Reviews

Dust in the Heart by Ralph Dennis

constantreader471's review against another edition

4.0

Ralph Dennis is an under appreciated writer of hard boiled noir crime fiction, in the style of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. This story has Wilton Drake, Sheriff of Webster County, North Carolina, on the trail of a killer who rapes and murders small girls. Drake is crippled because of a sniper bullet wound to his hip while he was a marine. His wife left him while he was recovering from multiple surgeries. How he confronts the complexities of this case, involving some wealthy friends of his chief suspect and a US Marshall worried that he is intruding on a witness in the Witness Protection program, makes for a suspenseful thriller. He rebuilds his life in this book.
I can emphasize with his difficulties with the FBI as I worked for a separate US law enforcement agency. I read this book in 1 day.
This was an Amazon flash sale purchase.

allyreads8521's review against another edition

2.0

This had the potential to be great, but it wasn’t. The amount of editing errors was ridiculous, the story was all over the place, and all of the characters were easy to hate.