Review: A Killing Breath, by Faye Snowden

SYNOPSIS

From the world of Raven Burns. The third book in the award-winning Killing series by Faye Snowden, following A Killing Fire and A Killing Rain.
Raven Burns owes her life to the kind souls who looked after her while her father, unbeknownst to them, sowed a path of blood and bodies from California to Louisiana as one of the most notorious serial killers ever known, Floyd “Fire” Burns. When Raven was a girl, Floyd brutally murdered one of those kind souls, Miss Ruth Jefferson, when the woman made the fatal decision to open the door to him on a pitch-black 4th of July night.

As Raven learned of her father’s crimes, she vowed to do everything in her power to put men like him away. Decades later Raven’s hunt for a serial killer terrorizing the town leads her right back to that 4th of July night, and a memory that will make her question how much Floyd’s evil has settled in her bones.

My Review

Thanks to Anne at Random Things Tours for organising this tour, and to the team at Flame Tree for my copy of this book.

The past comes back to haunt everyone.

In the tiny town of Byrd’s Landing, there’s a triple murder in a run-down church yard and then a series of murders the police and mayor insist are domestic violence cases. There’s a suspiciously nice odd job man hanging around.

Detective Raven Burns is going slightly crazy, and there’s root workers living in a compound in an abandoned community. People are keeping secrets and people are dying. Raven fixates on the leader of the community, and the chief is lying to her. When her partner is shot, Raven starts to work things out. And her daddy, serial killer Floyd Burns, is still haunting her.

I wasn’t sure where this book was going when I started reading it. I picked up some of the back story from the text, but I might have got more from it if I’d read the first two books in the series.

The town of Byrd’s Landing feels real, or as real as I can imagine. My knowledge of small town Louisiana comes from Small Town Murder episodes and knowing a bit of history. There’s racism, and then there’s US Southern states racism. It’s evil. The police are incompetent, undereducated, politically led and willing to blame crimes on the nearest person they can find. And it was worse in the past. This novel has the characters facing their past crimes and the past crimes of people in town while dealing with their own crimes and on-going cases.

This is a psychologically fascinating book. Snowden draws on the history of her country to write a complex tale of trauma and revenge in a place haunted by the past.

Raven Burns is morally grey, she’s committed awful crimes, although none as bad as her father, and she carries the guilt heavily. It messes up her ability to investigate, especially as the victims are childhood friends of hers. Raven is a haunted, complex character in a haunted, broken town. She’s forgotten significant events in her past, makes mistakes and fixates on the wrong things, and gets people killed. Her mistakes are mirrored by other people’s mistakes and they all need therapy. And a good shaking. Communicate people, communicate!

It’s a haunting that spills over onto people who haven’t done anything wrong and are actually trying to help others. But they’ve built their community in a part of town people want to forget, and that makes them a target for Raven, who went through a traumatic childhood experience in the same part of town. She’s displacing her forgotten trauma on to others because of their location.

Snowden’s description of the setting is evocative, I could feel the damp, hot air of the swamp and the slithering of the snakes beneath Raven. The violence is visceral and the dilapidated buildings of Old Bottoms are clearly delineated.

Swapping between Raven and Floyd’s perspectives was an interesting choice. It brings the past into the present and enlightens the reader about aspects of the story other characters are hiding, or have forgotten. Sometimes it slows the narrative, but the breaks are necessary or it would be overwhelming, since it all happens over the space of a few days.

I didn’t get the clue about the phone calls until the author lets us in on the secret. I was frustrated by the stubbornness of the Chief and Stevenson leading to extra deaths and Raven being kidnapped, twice. I know that’s an important part of the story but I’d have slapped them both silly for lying and gaslighting. Raven’s obsession with Lucian Toussaint (named after one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture perhaps?) is dangerous and unfounded, but entirely in keeping with her psychology. He does something she doesn’t understand so he must be a criminal hiding things. If Stevenson had listened to her and the Chief had told her the truth from the start, she wouldn’t have been kidnapped, twice.

She might also not have had the breakthrough with her memory, although someone would probably have told her. The obstacles seemed strange and unnecessary as I read but as it all came together, it all made sense and I got why the writer made the characters stubborn or dishonest, apart from it being in-character with previous actions, as we learn from reading the novel.

Altogether, a tough but satisfying read. I’m considering getting the first two books so that I can get more of the story.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Faye Snowden is the award-winning author of the Killing series. The second book in the series, A Killing Rain, was named as one of the best southern gothic mysteries of 2022, was long-listed for CWA’s Gold Dagger, and won gold in the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year awards.
She has received competitive writing fellowships from Djerassi and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Two of her short stories have been anthologized in The Best American Mystery and Suspense (2021 & 2023).

Faye is a member of Sisters in Crime, Crime Writers of Color, and Mystery Writers of America. Today, she works and writes from her home in Northern California while enjoying the company of her extremely rowdy and gorgeous grandchildren.

fayesnowden.com / Instagram: @fayesnowden

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