Fleet Landing

There are so many angles and directions that you can tackle the crime genre in. Being a police officer is obvious, but you also get Private Investigators, or even the local busybody or vicar solving a crime. I enjoy all these approaches, but if you are drawn to particularly thoughtful and informed crime stories, you may want to read a more procedural book that follows an expert in their profession. In the case of Fleet Landing by Wendy Gee this expert is ATF Special Agent Cooper “Coop” Bellamy, and his knowledge is needed as half the city has been put to flame. 

An arsonist is targeting the homes and businesses of Fleet Landing, one of the poorer areas of Charleston. Is it the local gangs? Could it be white supremacists who do not like the locals? Or could it all be linked to a series of similar arson attacks decades earlier? Coop is tasked with investigating the recent fires and for company he has been lumbered with a press liaison in the form of the tenacious TV reporter Sydney Quinn. The duo finds themselves working both a modern and a historic arson case as they find themselves in the crossfire of a killer. 

It can be tricky shoehorning in an investigator into a crime story that makes sense, but an ATF agent and a reporter makes sense as they are both people used to researching and coming to conclusions. Is Coop the perfect protagonist for this tale? It may have made more sense to have the Detective lead the case, but when it comes to fire, there are few who know as much as Coop. 

This is a true procedural crime story, one that respects the rules and regulations of crime solving. At the start of the story, this is Coop’s philosophy and as a reader we follow in his footsteps. There feels like a level of detail and realism in the book that suggests Gee has experience on the subject matter. This does mean that the book can lack a little punch in places, but authors like Michael Connelly have proven that following good investigative work is reward for the reader themselves. 

Like many a good crime novel, Gee does not have one story, but two parallel. A reopened cold case may have bearing on the latest fires. Here Sydney can shine as she investigates the decades old case as Coop works on the new one. The threads begin to come together as the book concludes. The procedural part of the book ends and instead you are rewarded with an action-packed climax. Arguably, the investigation is over too quickly. The more procedural feel of the book left me thinking the case would have taken months to investigate and years to fully convict, but that won’t make for the most exciting novel! 

There are some elements of the book that felt alien to me but impact the story to make it more exciting. Racial tensions play a key role in the book; there seems to be a casual reaction by character about being former membership of Far-Right groups. I would have thought being an open former member of of the KKK may have stopped any accent into mainstream politics, but perhaps not in this Charleston. 

Fleet Landing is a very solid crime tale that will appeal to fans of the genre, to those that like their investigations well thought through and with some realism. Things do become more hectic later in the book, but in the whole, this is the type of building pot boiler that fans of the crime genre seek.