Fire Trap

By Bob Kroll

ECW Press     2019

296 pages     Noir

T.J. Peterson is an ex-cop suffering from PTSD and depression. Apparently, some of the details of his fall happened in earlier books, since Fire Trap is the third book in the series. (The other books include The Drop Zone and The Hell of it All.) At any rate, the reader can glean that he lost his job after a shooting, his wife has died, his daughter is a druggie, and he and his girlfriend have reached an impasse. In the conclusion to the series, his daughter and her childhood friend are both missing, but Peterson keeps getting messages indicating that the young women are pawns in a game targeting Peterson. He springs into action to try to rescue both girls and solve a series of killings.

Peterson suffers numerous flashbacks as he searches for the women, interviews numerous sleezy characters, and uncovers the dark web of porn in his hometown of Halifax. Sometimes, the reader needs to keep a list of characters, so wide is the range of people and places Peterson investigates. One reviewer mentioned that the book would make more sense if it was read in one sitting—so intricate and involved is the book’s structure. When I finally decided I was going to finish the book and sat down to get through it, I was able to appreciate Peterson and his life situation. For example, his counselor tries to comfort him: “Life plays tricks on us, Peterson. It lines the road with obstacles. Some are more difficult than others to climb over. We never sought to bury the circumstances of your life, but to reconcile them with the torment inside your head.” About three-quarters of the way through, the plot starts to move quickly and becomes a page-turner.

The dark procedural takes place in Halifax Nova Scotia, a place I have never visited and thought I could visit by reading Fire Trap. I had met a couple from Halifax on my recent trip to Vietnam, and they convinced me to come and visit their town. Uh huh! Fire Trap was definitely not the Halifax I want to visit. Atlantic Books Today, a Canadian review site muses: “No city can possibly claim to be perfect and doubtless the municipality of Halifax, Nova Scotia is no exception. Despite its reputation as being a beautiful and outwardly friendly place to visit, Halifax cannot possibly be as idyllic a destination as tourism commercials would have us believe. Yet you’d be hard-pressed to find a depiction of a major Canadian city as unremittingly bleak as the metropolitan nightmare author Bob Kroll makes of Halifax.”

Bob Kroll is a career-long author. It seems wise to me that he decided to make this only a trilogy. How much more could one ex-cop suffer? Publisher’s Weekly suggests that Fire Trap is a morality tale “strictly for serious fans,” and I would concur. I am not sure that I would have completed it were it not that it had been sent to me by the publisher.