Coming into a series at the nineteenth book is not a good idea! This story was filled with allusions to earlier books in the series that would have evoked memories and emotions for fans of the series but I just found them vague and incomprehensible. The protagonist of this story is Dr. Alan Gregory who is a psychotherapist in Boulder, Colorado. He is married to an Assistant District Attorney. He is good friends with a Boulder police officer named Sam. Apparently, some time about three years in the past, Sam murdered an ex-girlfriend who was threatening his child and Alan's child and made it look like suicide. Alan knew about the murder after the fact but didn't tell anyone. Now, a new witness has come forward and it looks like their carefully constructed tissue of lies is about to be exposed.Meanwhile, Alan's partner Diane is falling apart from a combination of traumas that occurred in earlier books, marital troubles with her venture capitalist husband, and hatred for her home outside of Boulder. All during the book, Boulder is under threat from various wildfires raging through the area. Alan also has a couple of new patients. One is the young man who was in a coma in the room where Sam and Alan discussed the new investigation of Sam's murder. The young man - that Sam and Alan call Coma Doe - intends to blackmail Alan into helping him find Sam in order to get some leverage for his own potential drug conviction. Alan's other new patient is a woman who is having a relationship with Diane's husband and who seems to be using Alan for her own purposes.The story was complex and the different plot threads were entwined in many ways. I will have to say that I didn't like Alan or Sam very much at all. I couldn't understand their decision to force someone to commit suicide and then cover it up. I also thought that Alan was over-analytical. He never seemed to turn off his role as a psychotherapist. He also seemed to skate around his ethics fairly often. Sam was also an ambiguous character. Some of the vocabulary in the story also sent me to my online dictionary. I am assuming that the word choices were specific vocabulary to psychotherapy. I know there were two or three words that I had never heard of or had never encountered in anything else I had read. This almost never happens to me as a reader and slowed down the flow of the story for me.This story may well work better for those who have read previous volumes and who have an emotional connection to the main characters. While I thought the story was interesting, I didn't make an emotional connection to it. This one is only recommended to those who have read other books in the series. I didn't find it a good entry point.
