Not Dead Enough - Phillip Thompson

 

"He was a giant vortex of reckless. You know that. And the man is dead." "Not dead enough," Flip said. "It's like he's aways around."

 Mississippi County Sheriff Colt Harper and his deputy John Carver are still haunted by something that happened on the Iraqi border after the 9-11 mass murders. They do wonder if they could have done more to keep their reckless buddy from so needlessly getting himself killed that night, but no one feels worse than Robert "Flip" Wilson, the marine who was there when it all happened. 

Colt Harper and John Carver also share an unbreakable bond between themselves and their fellow combat veteran marines. So when "Flip"  becomes the chief suspect in the murder of a man whose body is discovered in Colt's rural county by two local fisherman, Colt finds himself in a real predicament. Is his first responsibility to get justice for the dead man or to protect his unstable war buddy? A little to John's dismay, Colt's sense of justice will not allow him to treat this case differently from any other.

And this is where the real fun in Not Dead Enough starts, because Wilson didn't turn up in Mississippi unnoticed. Hot on his trail are some very dangerous killers from Los Angeles and Memphis, and if Colt doesn't get to Wilson before they do, his friend is going to end up very, very dead. 

Not Dead Enough is the fourth book in Thompson's Sheriff Colt Harper series, but it's my first experience with Harper and deputies John Carver and Molly McDonough, both of whose backstories are explored in some detail here. The novel works well as a standalone, but I'm curious now to learn how much more was revealed about their relationships in the first three books. In Not Dead Enough, Molly is the more interesting of the two because of her struggle with sobriety as a deputy sheriff who has been sober for exactly one year. I would really like to know what made Colt take the chance of making her such a key part of his department -so I now plan to go back and read the first three Sheriff Colt Harper books. I suspect this is a series that could really grow on me.

Phillip Thompson

The Colt Harper Series:

• Outside the Law (2016)
• Deep Blood (2017)
• Old Anger (2020)
• Not Dead Enough (2023)