Review: The Bitter Past (Porter Beck #1) by Bruce Borgos

The Bitter Past (Porter Beck #1) by Bruce Borgos

Blurb from Goodreads:

In the tradition of Craig Johnson and C. J. Box, Bruce Borgos's The Bitter Past begins a compelling series set in the high desert of Nevada featuring Sheriff Porter Beck…

Porter Beck is the sheriff in the high desert of Nevada, north of Las Vegas. Born and raised there, he left to join the Army, where he worked in Intelligence, deep in the shadows in far off places. Now he's back home, doing the same lawman's job his father once did, before his father started to develop dementia. All is relatively quiet in this corner of the world, until an old, retired FBI agent is found killed. He was brutally tortured before he was killed and clues at the scene point to a mystery dating back to the early days of the nuclear age. If that wasn't strange enough, a current FBI agent shows up to help Beck's investigation.

In a case that unfolds in the past (the 1950s) and the present, it seems that a Russian spy infiltrated the nuclear testing site and now someone is looking for that long-ago, all-but forgotten person, who holds the key to what happened then and to the deadly goings on now.

My Review:
Lincoln County, Nevada is not somewhere many people have been and certainly not somewhere written about and, yet, it was the perfect setting for this mystery/police procedural with two feet - one in the past and one in the present.  I know and have spent time in this part of the state and the author captured it brilliantly.  I immediately fell for the protagonist of this tory -- Porter Beck -- as he tries to uncover a huge mystery and solve a few murders along the way.  The setting was fantastic, the pacing perfect and I read this in one day.  I can't wait for more!

The Bitter Past comes out next week on July 18, 2023, and you can purchase HERE!  I loved this book and can't wait for more from this series!

We don't have a lot of murder in Lincoln County. The long stretches of open road provide us with more than our share of high-speed vehicular deaths, the images of which can haunt your dreams, but there just isn't a lot of people killing other people on purpose. When we do encounter it, it's never like this. This is something from Hell.