Iain Hogan is a down on his luck reporter who has been given a second chance to be a print reporter again with a small newspaper on the Isle of Wight. He gets his first experience with small town life when he finds the police investigating the attempted murder of a young woman that no one on the island seems to know. . She has either fallen or been pushed from a cliff and doesn't match any of the missing persons reports. Using his usual aggressive investigative style, he is quickly reminded by his bosses that in a small town, one must tread lighter.

Assigned to cover the meeting of a group of woman who are opposed to shutting down the walking trail along the cliff, he meets Emma Thomas, an ambitious young detective who quickly becomes both his friend and lover. When Emma gets a tip that Clara and Maria, two sisters who are in charge of the woman opposed to the shutting down of the walking trail, might know something about the girl's accident, she goes to question them and senses that Clara is attracted to her and decides to use that to her advantage. The next morning, Clara informs her that the good time they had the night before involved Clara's 15-year-old maid and Emma quickly finds herself being blackmailed by Clara and desperately tries to use her relationship with Hogan to turn his curiosity away from the sisters. But when the maid is found dead near where the first girl fell, Hogan begins to aggressively look into the background of the sisters, finding that they run an adoption agency for Romanian children. Not having seen any children in their home and sensing something not right with the sisters, Hogan is convinced they are up to no good. In a search for the truth that leads him from the Isle of Wight to the sewers of Romania, Hogan is willing to risk everything, even his life to discover the truth and bring a cold-hearted killer to justice.

Rennick, with a good deal of knowledge about investigative reporting under his belt has created a fast-paced thriller in which you will figure out who the killer is several times, only to find out it is someone you never suspected.

Reviewed by Shelley McKibbon

A young girl falls from a seacoast cliff. A reporter tries to salvage his career. And an ambitious young police officer seeks advancement.

THE FALLEN begins with the discovery of an unidentified girl at the foot of a cliff, the apparent victim of an accident. Hogan, a reporter newly separated from his family and intent on beginning a new life on the Isle of Wight, is assigned to the story. He finds himself fascinated with the mysterious victim, and also with the young female detective heading the investigation.

More a thriller than a mystery, THE FALLEN is briskly plotted and written in a sparse style that is remarkably effective in conveying the mood and the surroundings of the character. Rennick does not use descriptive passages to help the reader see his setting. Instead, he lets us follow Hogan around the island, creating our own mental images. Hogan's story is revealed gradually, naturally, and he is a satisfactorily complex and essentially believable character. The newspaper where he works and the men he encounters, both there and on the police force, are also realistic and believable. When Hogan's investigation takes him away from England, there is still a strong feeling of where he is and where we have followed him.

Rennick also takes us into the minds of several female characters who are clearly involved with the cliff incident. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes apparent that he is not interested in making them into full-blown, complex characters. The women of this story are generally either incompetent or filled with a motiveless, and apparently pointless, malevolence. One of the few exceptions is a young woman who looks after Hogan when he is in a foreign country, and she cooks for him, translates for him, has sex with him, and gives up her body to further his aims. Then she conveniently disappears at a crucial moment, freeing Hogan from the need to consider her while he has other things on his mind. This character counts as a sympathetic one, insofar as she is a character at all. But back in England, women are busy muffing investigations and carrying on all sorts of intrigues that are never clearly explained but which are obviously linked to the crimes Hogan is investigating. When Hogan is given clear and believable reasons for his actions, it really does not work to depict the villains as evil just because they're evil.

THE FALLEN would have benefited from the services of a stern editor and proofreader. There are numerous plot threads, some introduced very late in the story, and not all of them are resolved satisfactorily. On one occasion, Hogan and his new sidekick, Scarlett (introduced in the final few chapters), recall a statement apparently made by a suspect. But the one scene in which the two meet this character contains no such comment, and there is no time unaccounted for in which she could have made it offstage. There is a neatly tied-up ending, but no real resolution, since the explanation offered for the crimes committed in the story is remarkably weak. Had Rennick taken more space to tell his story, he could probably have produced a more convincing result. And a closer proofing of the final draft could have avoided a number of spelling and punctuation errors.

All things considered, THE FALLEN is a respectable novel, which held my interest for as long as it focused on Hogan. However, the weaknesses in Rennick's depiction of several vital characters made it impossible for me to sustain my enjoyment through the entire story. When contrasted to the lifelike and sympathetic, though realistically flawed, Hogan, these weaker characters and motivations seemed even more unlikely. Either staying with Hogan for the whole story, or giving more thought to the motivations and behaviour of his unsympathetic characters, could have made this a bang-up crime novel.