Category: Sam Batford

Fools Gold by Ian Patrick Series: Sam Batford, #3 Kindle Edition, 237 pg. Fahrenheit Press, 2020 Read: August 25-26, 2021 Grab a copy from your local indie bookstore!

I love remote working. It means I can be where I need to be, doing what I need to do, when I need to do it. After that there’s whatever time’s left for police work. I don’t regard myself as a criminal. I’m just a disgruntled public servant supplementing my meagre living. Most criminals I despise but there are a few who break the mould.

I’m one of them, after all.

What’s Fools Gold About?

After recovering from Stoned Love, Batford’s thrown back into the field. This time, he’s answering directly to Klara Winter and she’s got two things on her mind—shutting down an armed robbery team and exposing Batford.

Batford has three missions—stopping the robbery team; finishing cleaning up after his former boss/mentor—including getting what cash he can; and staying clean in front of Winter. Note the qualifier there, clean “in front of” Winter, not clean.

Typical police procedural stuff, right?

The UC work is great—and Batford ends up finding more criminal activity than the police were aware of when the operation started. I don’t want to get into it, because it’s better for you to read it. But like so many of the police actions in Patrick’s works, it screams authenticity.

So, what did I think about Fools Gold?

There was a time the police were viewed as protectors and defenders. In a way that still applies: Terrorists denied their spoils, criminal networks disrupted, drugs and guns seized. I’m part of all that but no longer feel like crew on the good ship, Justice.

I’m pretty sure I’ve said something like this before, but it’s worth repeating. It takes a special skill to make readers get behind a crooked cop—a reader will accept a Bosch or a Rebus bending the rules a bit to get the murderer to confess or get convicted. But that’s not Batford. Well, okay, it is. But that’s not all that Batford does—while he gets results/arrests/stops whatever crime he’s been sent to investigate, he also makes sure he profits off it. And somehow Patrick gets his readers to hope Batford gets away with it. At least a little bit.

It drives me crazy—I want him to succeed and I hope he spends the rest of his life behind bars. You figure that out, I can’t.

Patrick’s prose here is as lean as ever—and once the momentum builds up, it doesn’t stop. There’s a ticking clock on Batford’s investigation, and it carries over to the novel. The action propels you from one scene to the next.

There’s real growth in Patrick’s plotting—with no disrespect intended to his previous work—but this feels so much tighter, he doesn’t waste a moment.

And that ending? I don’t have words for it. It’s both a great launching pad in the (seemingly unlikely) case that there’s a fourth Batford novel, and a great way to conclude the trilogy.

Get them all—this would work okay as a stand-alone, but as the end of a run? It’s great. It’s a trilogy that goes from strength to strength, and you’d be smart to pick it up.

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