Daniel Mansfield Jr. has spent his life in the shadow of a legend. His father—the celebrated police chief who ended the reign of The Bookbinder, a serial killer who used the flesh of his victims to bind his books—left Daniel a name to live up to and a department to inherit. Now Daniel sits in that same chair, in that same town of Sossaman, Arizona, carrying that same weight. Then a young woman turns up dead, bearing The Bookbinder's unmistakable signature. The problem is Brian Quintana, the man Daniel's father arrested, has been behind bars for nearly forty years.
Which means either an imitator is at work, or Daniel's father put the wrong man away. As clues pile up and another victim disappears, Daniel must confront the most dangerous question of his career: what if the legacy he has dedicated his life to protecting was built on a lie? Meanwhile, Johnathan Ottilie is unraveling a secret of his own, one that connects his family directly to The Bookbinder's dark history in ways he never imagined and cannot outrun. Two families. Two inherited sins. One small Arizona community that will never be the same.
This was a pretty solid and somewhat enjoyable police-procedural thriller. The whole setup here, involving the work of this strange serial killer running through this community and eventually getting caught by this star policeman who finally brought an end to his rampage, earning him a huge amount of respect on the force, gives this a fun starting point. Getting a chance to dive into the small-town community that this all took place in, everything that comes about here involving the new rampage that's started up, showing signs of the fabled killer that's been locked behind bars for years now, sets up an intriguing mystery that uses the details from the previous case to set up everything going forward. The fact that it ties into family legacy and duty, carrying on what his father did and making sure this is genuine, offers the kind of fun counterbalance to everything, which is what makes the setup here immensely fun.
This setup and resulting fallout, with the series of bodies turning up that present themselves as the next stage of the killer's rampage, are mostly fun enough as they generate some intriguing setpieces showing the interactions that are in place here to build off those factors. With the idea of the two characters trying to live up to family legacies, with the policeman trying to uphold a legacy from his father that might not be accurate and the other guy slowly coming to the realization that he's connected to the famous serial killer, there's a fun concept at play that gets explored with the different revelations that take place. Some of these elements are more in tune with the kind of approach here that favors the police-procedural approach rather than straightforward genre elements that the setup offers, especially with the brutality inherent in the crimes that would signal more overt qualities, but otherwise, it's not a major issue keeping this one down.
4.5/5
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