Masterful crime writer Bruce Robert Coffin is back on the beat where he belongs, with lights flashing and sirens wailing to mark the twisted track of tarnished Maine state trooper detective Brock Justice in Crimson Thaw, the debut novel in a new series of detective mysteries.

Coffin, drawing on his long career as a cop’s cop in Portland, is a past master at portraying the dogged pursuit of homicide detectives on the trail of a killer, crafting realistic tales of long hours, uncooperative dirtbags and bosses as well as partners who may not like each other, punctuated by occasional bursts of gunfire, betrayal, lust and mayhem.

His previous series, the Detective Byron mysteries, always seemed to rise above the plodding routine of the police procedural without relying on the crutches and cliches lesser writers use to make their characters warmer and fuzzier, more relatable to a core readership demographic. His new series, centered on a cop who committed the cardinal sin of telling the truth about one of his own, achieves a similar narrative altitude — without sacrificing any of the detailed authenticity procedural aficionados expect.

Justice, the estranged son of a legendary statie, has been exiled to the outback of Maine’s northern woods and small towns. Nobody trusts him after he told the truth about seeing his partner shoot an unarmed criminal. Nobody likes him, including a new boss with the nickname of Penny Dreadful.

Recently divorced, he’s alone and isolated. And immediately thrown into the deep water of a fresh homicide with a newly minted detective, Chloe Wright, promoted from the uniform side of the house. Justice is less than thrilled about having to nursemaid a rookie murder cop on a case that gains instant notoriety because the victim is handcuffed to a high-dollar snowmobile found at the bottom of a pond by a team of divers on a training exercise.

More to the point, Wright was one of the divers and first found the victim and his last earthly ride — a local roustabout, low-rent criminal and Lothario named Lee Owen. When he wasn’t dealing drugs or jumping the bones of another man’s wife, Owen worked as a handyman for the snowmobile’s owner, a physician and pillar of the community who also hosts a weekly poker game whose players include the county sheriff and Justice’s father, a hard-drinking outdoorsman and widower who doesn’t much like his son.

Coffin shows Justice and Wright working the case, pulling the string on records and other paperwork, plodding their way through interviews with friends, lovers, co-workers, shifty skells and collateral victims, all while working on the fly to build a partnership Justice doesn’t particularly want to happen.

Nor does Wright, not after Justice leaves her in the lurch more than once to work a hot lead he doesn’t share, displaying the cowboy habits that landed him in the mess that led to his exile. The two have more than one come-to-Jesus meeting about Justice’s high-handed ways but it takes him getting set up to take a midnight run to the murder pond, where a sniper tries to take him out, for Justice to knock off the solo act and partner up with Wright.

Like a veteran dealer at a casino poker table, Coffin shuffles through a deck of possible suspects, including the former enforcer of a local biker gang; the rich doctor who owned the snowmobile of death, which turned out to have secret compartments perfect for smuggling drugs from Canada; the victim’s baby mama; and a crooked sheriff and one of his top deputies. Even Justice’s father falls under suspicion because the handcuffs used to bind Owen to the snowmobile were once issued to him.

The author also deftly handles major issues such as betrayal, trust, familial fault lines that never heal, the blue code of silence, jealousy, cutthroat office politics and greed — all in a natural way that flows with the story instead of against the grain.

And he keeps a writerly ace up his sleeve — a late-breaking plot twist that only a savant would see coming. Glad to see a great writer back in his natural habitat. Can’t wait for the next Detective Brock Justice novel, Bitter Fall, which is coming out in mid-January.

Bruce Robert Coffin’s Crimson Thaw, the first in the new Detective Brock Justice series, is available in paperback and Kindle versions at: https://www.amazon.com/Crimson-Thaw-Detective-Justice-Book-ebook/dp/B0DMFXSZNW