STEVEN F. HAVILL – Heartshot. St. Martin’s Press, hardcover, March 1991. Poisoned Pen Press, softcover, 2007.

   There’s always a small shiver of excitement that runs through a reader when a new writer comes along showing all the signs of being a natural-born storyteller. It’s a chancy thing, though, and while it was there at the beginning of Steven Havill’s debut novel Heartbeat, but by book’s end, sadly to say, the flame had flickered and was sadly diminished.

   Telling the story is Bill Gastner, an aging (and badly overweight) undersheriff for Posadas County, New Mexico. A relic of the past and chafing under the recent election of a PR-oriented sheriff, Gastner wonders if perhaps his days on the job are numbered. Then a carload of teenagers smashes up, leaving five of them dead, and in the car is $150,000 worth of cocaine.

   So Gastner, with the help of Estelle Reyes, the only detective on the force, gets a chance to show he’s still worth his keep. It’s an excellent start, but halfway through the book, things begin to go awry. A fine new secondary character is introduced, but the potential to do even better things with him is sadly wasted.

   Maybe Havill didn’t intend to write a mystery. Maybe he meant only to write a crime story taking place in small town near the Mexican border. But if you wish for matters like motives, opportunities and small clues to be connected up, you will have to wait longer than the author seems to have taken pages to tell.

   [WARNING: Plot Alert] It might have been a good idea at the time, but one thing I don’t understand is why Gastner contronts one of the villains while they are alone together in a private airplane. (I won’t reveal any identities, but any detective story reader who doesn’t know who it is long before they take off simply hasn’t been paying attention.) Not only that, Gastner has just stolen his way out of a hospital room afer suffering a severe heart attack, and the plane is not pressurized. Oh, oh.

   Don’t get me wrong. The characters in Heartshot are terrific. It’s going to be the first in a series, I’m sure, and the people in this one are worth coming back to, to find out more about them. The writing is fine, and the storytelling ability is there. So what’s missing? Simply somebody (an editor, most preferably) to tell the author that the story he’s telling just isn’t holding all the water it’s supposed to.

      The Bill Gastner series —

Heartshot (1991)
Bitter Recoil (1992)
Twice Buried (1994)
Before She Dies (1996)
Privileged to Kill (1997)
Prolonged Exposure (1998)
Out of Season (1999)

Dead Weight (2000)
Bag Limit (2001)

   After Bill Gastner’s retirement, the remaining books in the series feature Undersheriff Estella Reyes-Guzman:

Scavengers (2002)

A Discount for Death (2003)
Convenient Disposal (2004)
Statute of Limitations (2006)
Final Payment (2007)

The Fourth Time is Murder (2008)
Red, Green, or Murder (2009)
Double Prey (2011)

One Perfect Shot (2012)

[UPDATE] 03-07-12.   With all of the followup books in the series, it’s a good thing that Steven Havill did not read this review and decide to call it quits on a writing career, right then and there. Maybe you shouldn’t pay any attention to it, either. In any case, I don’t have any of the other books in the series, and I think I ought to remedy that.