Review - The Girl in the Wind by Gregory Ashe

Theo and Auggie are back home after being dragged into a murder investigation in the Ozarks. They’re hoping things can get back to normal, but then a girl goes missing on the first day of school, where Theo is a teacher. Auggie was helping the student with her college application project, so both men are concerned about her disappearance. As the pair look into what happened, several clues point back to the Cottonmouth Club, the place at the center of an investigation into drugs and wildlife smuggling.

“The Girl in the Wind” picks up where The Face in the Water left off, so you need to have read the first book before picking this one up. Auggie and Theo were introduced in the previous story, which centered on Tean and Jem. That couple plays a role in this book, along with the other two couples we met. The first chapter is a little head-spinning, as all eight men are in it and you try to remember who they all are.

As I wrote in my review of the previous book, the writing style infers we should know more about Theo and Auggie’s back story than we do. The two are strangers to us when the book starts, and while we learn a lot about both of the men, there are still references to significant people in their lives that never actually appear in the book, yet it seems we should know them. It’s a rather unusual writing style, which I (obviously) find a little disconcerting.

Theo is definitely a complex enigma. He has a PhD in English (presumably) and teaches high school. We learn early on that he has probably had a substance abuse problem in his past. As the story unfolds, he’s also clearly dealing with anger issues. The drivers for these problems are never discussed openly, but some of them can be guessed at. Auggie also has a mysterious past that seems to include abusive relationships. It’s made him very good at managing volatile people, which is exactly what Theo is for most of the story. Auggie seems like a very nice person, and the care he has for Theo is very obvious.

While the various personalities of the men in the series are a bit of a mystery, it’s the investigations into multiple deaths that ultimately drive the stories. In this installment, the clues are peeled back one by one to get to some, but not all, of the answers. At the risk of a minor spoiler, one of the interesting aspects of this book was that not everything is connected. Although evidence mounts up that the Cottonmouth Club is the center of operations for a major crime ring, the crime that becomes central to this story can’t be blamed directly on the club.

“The Girl in the Wind” is available from Smashwords or Amazon (commissionable link).