Book Review of Anna: A Cliff Ford Mystery by Terry Toler
This police procedural mystery hits justice, as it obviously should, some relationship redemption, and the bad guys are motivated by vengeance. We get them all. This is the first novel in the Cliff Hanger series, a nice play on words, as the main character is Chicago homicide investigator Cliff Ford. Apparently only his mother called him Clifford (though one character does in the story) and I can see why. Clifford Ford is a bit awkward.
Cliff meets a mysterious and beautiful woman named Anna in a coffee shop in chapter one. By the end of the chapter, she is supposedly dead and laying in the city morgue, having been murdered. It’s not Cliff’s case to find out who killed her, but his obsession with Anna drives him to do his own investigating on the side.
This mystery takes several turns and keeps the reader guessing. There’s a powerful Chicago gang involved called the Strikers. These guys are into everything from drugs, human trafficking, to murder. Mr. Toler is hitting many of the investigator tropes. Cliff’s wife was murdered about a year ago, the case still unsolved. This unsolved murder plays a big role in this book. He’s a loner, socially awkward, and pours himself into his work. Two challenges I found in this. First, as good of a detective as he is supposed to be, the cases he solves in this book are handed to him on a sliver platter by a mysterious blond woman with incredible skills. Second, Cliff’s inner dialog spends a lot of time pontificating on how he’s breaking the rules of the department and how much trouble he could get into. If Cliff is going to be a lone gun, he needs more bravado and confidence.
I don’t know Chicago police procedures, but everything seemed reasonable and in fiction that’s what is important. It doesn’t have to be true, but it must be believable, and nothing made me pause and say, “Now wait a minute,“ unlike many other books I’ve read lately.
Another interesting aspect is that Mr. Toler brings in a character from another series of his, the Jamie Austen series. See my review of Save The Girls by Terry Toler, which is book one of this series.
Only one criticism and that is the deviation from Cliff’s first-person point of view for a few chapters. I don’t think these chapters were necessary. I would have preferred to keep things only in Cliff’s point of view and to discover what happened to Anna through Cliff’s eyes and not see it through the main bad guy’s or Anna’s points of view.
The book is clean. No sex. No profanity and no on page violence.
Overall, I rated this four stars on Amazon / Goodreads and recommend it. It was a fun read which moved fast. Eventually, I’ll try some more in the series. For this year’s reads, I put this at number six.
Book Rankings for 2022
- The Letter Keeper by Charles Martin
- Right Behind You by Lisa Gardner
- Moonlight Awakens by John Matthew Walker
- Win by Harlen Coben
- Murder Board by Brian Shea
- Anna: A Cliff Ford Mystery by Terry Toler
- The Man Burned by Winter by Pete Zacharias
- Into the Flames by Liz Bradford
- You Are Invited by Sarah A Denzil
- Girl, Alone by Blake Pierce
- One Night in Sedona by Carrie Latimer.
- Coffin Cove by Jackie Elliott
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