For diehard CSI fans currently missing Warrick, Grissom and Sara, Max Allan
Collins' series of novels based on the highly-acclaimed
US drama series will come as a welcome reminder of days gone by. The books, which to my knowledge, have not been televised, are all faithful adaptations of the original, and Cold Burn is no exception.
In keeping with the standard format of having two cases running concurrently,
Catherine Willows is left in charge of the department while Grissom and Sara head north to upstate New York to attend a forensic science conference. This all happens long before Grissom and Sara get together as an item of course, with Sara spending her free time at the mountain lodge hotel reading Agatha Christie novels while Grissom buries himself in his entomology textbooks. Whilst it’s blatantly obvious to the rest of us that these two really were made for each other, the same cannot be said yet of Grissom, who at one point looks at Sara “as though a lamp had talked”, and with Sara remarking that “You look rested” is one of the nicest things Grissom has ever said to her, you’ll agree that it’s going to be some time before it dawns on him that theirs is a match made in heaven.
Dragging Grissom away from his insects, Sara suggests a walk in the woods – to look for local species, naturally – but with the snow falling increasingly heavily, it isn’t long before they lose their bearings. They’re about to phone the hotel for help when Grissom smells burning, and following a frantic search through the woods, they stumble upon a burning human corpse. A bullet wound confirms that the victim was already dead when his body was set alight. As the weather worsens and access to the isolated hotel becomes impossible, it falls to Grissom and Sara to identify the charred remains and to locate the killer, assisted by Constable Gordon Maher from Canada, the only other delegate to have made the journey to the conference before the bad weather set in. The Las Vegas detectives have no experience of working in the snow, the sand of the Nevada deserts being rather more their forte, and while Maher lends his expertise to the case, Grissom can’t decide whether to regard him as an ally or a suspect. As an ally, his presence will be invaluable; as a suspect, he’s in the perfect position to cover his tracks by contaminating the evidence.
Meanwhile, back at the lab, Catherine, Nick and Warrick investigate the case of a naked female body found in the Lake Mead Recreational Park. It turns out that the corpse had been frozen before being dumped in the park, and with no identification to go on, Catherine and the team have a colossal task ahead of them to establish both who the victim is and when she was murdered, and that’s before they even begin to find out who killed her.
Novels based on television series could quite easily be poor imitations of the original concept, vacuous efforts designed to boost the coffers of the networks responsible for them rather than to provide further entertainment to the viewing public, but after reading several of
Collins’ offerings, I have to say that this series doesn’t fall into that category at all. It’s true to say that the writing style is very informal, occasionally resorting to the vernacular and that it’s weighted heavily towards dialogue rather than prose, but the genre is such that this is precisely what is called for in a novel of this kind. For viewers of the TV programme, no effort at all is required in associating the characters on the page with those on the screen, it’s a seamless continuation of that with which we’re already familiar, and in fact, any attempt at formality would be glaringly out of place here.
There’s good value here, too, with two cases for the price of one, and both are afforded equal attention to detail, with no skimping on the evidence presented or in explaining how it is used. It would have been very easy for Collins to gloss over the scientific detail in favour of the cop-versus-villain approach, but he resists the temptation and instead, you actually feel that you’ve learned something as well as having been entertained by not one, but two very plausible murder tales. There’s quite a lot of forensic information to digest, particularly for those of us with non-scientific minds, but it certainly doesn’t get so far bogged down with heavy and overly-technical data as to divert attention from the main thrust of the storylines. A pretty good balance is achieved overall, with the added bonus that you’ll learn how to freeze a body without subjecting it to freezer burn, should you ever have the need to acquire such a skill. Well, you never know.
As one who has watched the show from the outset, I can’t find fault at all with this literary version; Grissom and the gang are all present and correct, and each of the minor characters has substance and credibility too. The book contains a certain dryness of humour, not only in the dialogue content but also in the narrative, and this fits in well with the TV format, as well as providing the perfect contrast to the serious and analytical side of the individual cases.