Black Mountain (Isaiah Coleridge #2) 3Stars

 

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Title: Black Mountain
Series: Isaiah Coleridge #2
Author: Laird Barron
Rating: 3 of 5 Stars
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 296
Words: 83K
Publish: 2019

Isaiah Coleridge is not a good man. He might not beat his girlfriend, or hit her kid but that is about the only redeeming factor I can give in his favor. It’s not just that he came from a bad past, it is that he never truly broke from it, nor, and more damning in my opinion, does he really want to. He was a mob enforcer who brutalized and killed people and he sees that as no different a job than me surveying a piece of land for a subdevelopment. He does his thing to bad people, but that doesn’t make him a good guy. This was really made clear to me in this book. Coleridge isn’t even an anti-hero. He’s the protagonist of this series, but he’s just a lesser villain than the guys he goes after.

The guy he goes after is one whackadoodle of a villain this time too. He’s a rich boy serial killer whose family killed an innocent young man and sculpted the psycho to look like him and take over his life. He ended up doing dirty black work for the government and then went off reservation and started killing for fun again. Now he has an apprentice and it’s up to Coleridge to bring it all to light. It is seriously messed up. Throw in some illegal corporate medical work with fungus and you have something even the X-Files wouldn’t have dreamt up.

While I can’t honestly say that I “enjoyed” my time while reading this, I didn’t go into it each time dreading it or wishing it was over. Faint praise, I know, but I’m trying to stay positive. There is one more Coleridge book and after that, I’ll be done with the author.

★★★☆☆

From the Publisher:

When a small-time criminal named Harold Lee turns up in the Ashokan reservoir--sans a heartbeat, head, or hands--the local mafia capo hires Isaiah Coleridge to look into the matter. The mob likes crime, but only the crime it controls . . . and as it turns out, Lee is the second independent contractor to meet a bad end on the business side of a serrated knife. One such death can be overlooked. Two makes a man wonder.

A guy in Harold Lee's business would make his fair share of enemies, and it seems a likely case of pure revenge. But as Coledrige turns over more stones, he finds himself dragged into something deeper and more insidious than he could have imagined, in a labyrinthine case spanning decades. At the center are an heiress moonlighting as a cabaret dancer, a powerful corporation with high-placed connections, and a serial killer who may have been honing his skills since the Vietnam War. . .