Scene of the Crime - Ed Brubaker
P.I. Jack Herriman, son of a slain cop hero and nephew of a crime photographer, is asked by a woman to find her sister. He tracks her down easily enough and finds her apparently connected to a cult. The next day, she's been murdered. Jack goes looking for answers, and finds out some creepy similarities between this cult and a decades-old sex cult house that ended in deadly arson. With the help of another friendly P.I., he looks into the cult and finds even more old secrets than he bargained for. This is one of Brubaker's earliest works, and in my opinion one of his best; he is fortunate to be teamed with Michael Lark early on, whose angular drawing style fits his dark noir stories. Some people critique that the book is a bit wordy, but I didn't think it was overly so. I loved the pacing, the twists, and the smoldering anger that drives Jack, slowly revealed over the course of the story. It first appeared as a four-issue limited realistic detective story that, sadly, never got a sequel. (However, this volume does include a short and rather depressing short story featuring Jack that appeared elsewhere.) [5]
