Cop background brings dash of reality to Salt story

Out of the Blues Trudy Nan Boyce Putnam

The first novel in a planned series, Out of the Blues introduces an appealing new character in the police drama genre, Atlanta Detective Sarah Alt.

Detective Alt — she goes by her nickname, “Salt” — is the creation of Trudy Nan Boyce, who knows the Atlanta cop beat well: She worked on the city’s police force for more than 30 years, including time as a detective, before retiring to launch the Sarah Alt series.

As the novel opens, Salt has been promoted to the homicide unit and is given a cold case death to solve, with no partner to assist her. Adding to her challenge, the key new witness in the cold case is a man she sent to prison after he nearly killed her.

While Salt may have no partner, a member of the homicide squad, Bernard Wills, is her somewhat clandestine companion, both professionally and intimately.

Wills is working one of Atlanta’s most shocking murders — a woman and her two young daughters have been shot to death — while Salt is snooping around in the city’s darker, poorer and dangerous locales to determine if a gifted blues musician overdosed on heroin by accident, as initially ruled, or was murdered.

As the first novel in a series, Out of the Blues introduces information that may return in future episodes — Salt’s haunting memories, her family’s Victorian farmhouse, dogs that love and guide her, the role of blues in Southern music, the serenity of martial-arts training. Atlanta locales and history are a recurring element and Boyce describes them with colourful clarity.

If there’s a flaw to Boyce’s first novel, it’s that the tug of suspense basic to crime thrillers is lost at times as she indulges in slowmotion descriptive material.

But there is a lot to like about Salt and her world of police detective derring-do.