A Blake Harte Mystery, Book 10 - Harte

At last - with this book, we finally get resolution on some of the underlying plot threads that have been woven into this series since the very first book!  The story in this book has been building for a long time, and author Robert Innes does not disappoint.  This series started with the title character, Blake Harte, transferring to the small country village of Harmschapel, where he takes on the role of Detective Sergeant with the local police force.  He quickly develops a reputation for solving crimes that seem impossible - "locked room" mysteries, as they are sometimes called.  And Innes has definitely written some very well-plotted stories (leaving one to wonder just how he comes up with these crazy scenarios!).  But there has always been an underlying plot of why Harte moved away .... snippets of that incident of when he was just a boy ... an incident that has given him nightmares for years ... and the serial killer that he helped put away just before he moved to Harmschapel ... plus, there was the complication of that young man, his landlord's son, who has taken a particular interest in Blake, trying everything he can to destroy his relationship with Harrison Baxter.  And now, finally, everything is revealed in a devastating way...

This book is simply titled Harte, which is very fitting, since the mystery in this volume completely centers around Blake Harte.  His past comes back to haunt him in a vicious way.  Just as he is about to return to Manchester to help his best friend celebrate a momentous birthday, he and Harrison stumble across another body - only this one is not quite dead!  Tom Pattison, their landlord's son, has been struck in the head, and it's clear it was anything but an accident.  Blake, of course, wants to investigate, but he is told he is too close to the situation and to simply go on his vacation.  Little does he realize that his vacation is going to turn into one of the toughest cases of his career!

Innes holds back no punches with this one.  Harte finds himself once again facing the deadly Thomas Frost, who manages to escape prison in front of a live audience!  Everyone watches on television as he is loaded into the van that will transfer him to another secure prison - but when the van arrives at the other prison, the back doors are opened to find that Frost is not there!  How did he disappear from a guarded van that made no stops between the two prisons?  And with Frost once again on the loose, no one is safe.  Soon enough, the dead bodies start to turn up, and Sally (Blake's best friend and fellow cop) is called back on duty.  Blake manages to work his way into the investigation, but, boy is he in for some major surprises!  I won't spoil anything here, but I will say this - there are some definite unexpected surprises that no one could see coming, and if you think you have some of the connections between the characters figured out - think again!

Only Innes could write another impossible crime story that is so utterly engaging like this, and at a whopping 370 pages, not only is this the longest Blake Harte mystery to date, it is also by far the absolute BEST mystery to date.  With the life of someone very close to Blake on the line, he must not only figure out how Frost escaped from a moving van surrounded by cops, but he must also uncover the truth behind what happened to him when he was 10 years old, and exactly how Tom Pattison plays into all of this.  Expect the unexpected and just sit back and enjoy the ride as Innes takes you on a roller coaster ride from one shocking, awe-inspiring moments to another - and the ending?  Well, let's just say every once in a while, the hero does get a reward, and this time around, Blake might actually find himself a bit of real happiness at last.

Now, if we could just talk Innes into releasing the next book in paper format, and not just on Kindle!

RATING:  11 all-important license plates out of 10, well, simply because this book REALLY is that good!