A Blind Eye dumps G.M.Ford's crime journalist hero Corso in a mess of his own making, and shows him proceeding to make it worse. On the run from Texas Rangers who want to lock him up as a material witness over evidence he no longer has, Corso and his photographer and ex, Daugherty crash a car in a blizzard and end up taking refuge in a derelict farm-house. Corso's luck being what it is, he finds the farmer and his teenage sons wrapped in plastic in the barn, and a family album with their wife and mother carefully scissored out of every photograph. Framed for the death of a local deputy sheriff, Corso needs to clear himself, but gets far more involved in uncovering a series of deaths that no-one in authority had even noticed, that had their roots in an isolated rural community three decades ago.
This is a powerful and convoluted plot which spends much of the time teetering on the brink of the preposterous; Ford is as much of an extremist as his hero in his bad attitude to the official forces of law enforcement and the pieties of investigation - Corso is an intuitive investigator as much as a solid pursuer of the details of legwork. The prickly relationship between Corso and Daugherty, a very angry woman indeed, is developing into one of the more interesting affairs in current crime fiction. --Roz Kaveney
