The Diabolical: Killings in Costa Rica

The Diabolical by David Putnam is #11 in the Bruno Johnson crime thriller series.  I'd like to thank the publisher for my review copy. It was an advance reader copy when I received it, but this book has since been published on February 6th.  I finished it today post-midnight.  

I haven't read any previous books in the series.  It is important to note that Bruno Johnson and his wife have rescued thirteen children from abusive parents, but Marie, his wife, has recently given birth to their own first child.  

 In the eyes of the law, they are serial kidnappers.  The proper legal way to have proceeded would have been to have gone through lengthy processes to get the children removed from their parents' custody.  Each removal would need to be litigated separately. Then, if those were successful, each child probably would have been put into foster care where they may have continued to be abused.  Bruno and his wife, Marie, are wanted in the U.S. and now live in Costa Rica which had no extradition agreement with the U.S. when they settled there, but now they do.  So their life in Costa Rica is very precarious.

Bruno has a private investigator's license which I imagine he would have lost if he were extradited due to the kidnapping charges.  In Costa Rica, he is a hotel bartender.  I am wondering how Bruno and Marie are taking care of thirteen children on a bartender's pay even if he receives generous tips.  That doesn't seem credible even if the cost of living is very low in Costa Rica.

                                  

                                     

                                                                        

So now we move on to the current case.  Six people were killed in a mass shooting at the local night club, El Gato Gordo.   Bruno thought that the shooter had come to kill one person, but was trying to confuse matters by shooting others. 

More corpses  turned up including one who had been buried up to his waist in the sand trap at the ninth hole in the hotel golf course. 

When a character survived having their throat cut, I looked up how likely that would be, and discovered that many people do survive such an event.  So I did learn something from this book that I would never have read on my own.  

 I expect to rate The Diabolical four stars on Goodreads.  It was very unpleasant, but Bruno was a rather sympathetic protagonist even though he was no saint.