Excellent thriller. I really enjoyed the setting and the characters. I hope this becomes a series! I would love to see more Ethan Brand!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this arc in exchange for an honest review!

I discovered this series last year and thought it sounded like my kind of story: small town Sheriff dealing with small town crime up on the border of WA and Canada. The MC, Sheriff Ethan Brand, was likeable enough character and Blaine WA seemed like a small town with some questionable elements that could make for a good story or two. I was hesitant to continue the series after the first installment, but I’m glad I did. I liked this second installment a lot more than the first one. Sometimes it takes more than one installment for a good series to take off.

The gangs all back for this one. Sheriff Ethan, who has his two sons for the summer, is looking to surprise them with a horse and asks his deputy, Brenda Lee, to come along and help him pick one out. Brenda Lee is second in command and was also Ethan’s opponent in the last election for Sheriff. Needless to say, Brenda Lee thinks she would have been a better Sheriff and likes to remind Ethan of that frequently. It’s while trying to catch a runaway horse in an empty field that Brenda Lee literally stumbles onto an underground tunnel when she crashes down into it and finds a corpse.

The book summary introduces the primary storyline of the dead body being Tyler Rash, a homeless kid that Ethan’s parents took in for a while when Ethan and Tyler were teenagers. There was some bad history between Ty and Ethan because Ethan’s dad, a hard-core survivalist, always favored Ty over Ethan and made it very clear that Ty was the son that he always wished for. Anyway, because of the personal connection to the victim, Ethan has to pass the case onto Brenda Lee, who is just a little too happy about and is just loving bossing Ethan around a little too much – at first. It’s not long before it becomes clear why Ethan became Sheriff and not Brenda Lee.

There was also kind of a secondary storyline surrounding the mayoral election that was coming up soon. The current mayor, Eldon Mooney, was an old, rich, conservative, corrupt, racist, misogynistic, jerk from the old boys club and Mooney’s opponent was Arlene Six Crows, a younger, progressive, city councilwoman, as well as a woman of color. Mooney didn’t like that Ethan, the Sheriff, was promoting and campaigning for Arlene and political tensions were rising in the small town of Blaine and Arlene was becoming a target.

Most of the story covers the present-day investigation, with some flashbacks to the past when Ty lived with Ethan and his family as well as after Ethan’s dad went missing and then again after Ethan came back from Afghanistan, broken and busted up (minus a foot) and grieving his mother’s recent death. Ty’s mother, who abandoned him when he was a teenager, is tracked down and appears to have had some contact with him over the years, after he was grown and on his own. Needless to say, she was a piece of work.

The continuing character development of Ethan and his officers was good. I enjoyed the odd and sometimes tenuous interactions between Ethan and Von, a Seattle DEA agent, who was assigned to work with Ethan and his team in the investigation of the tunnel for possible smuggling activities. Von was a bit of a bad@$$ character, my fave kind of female characters. She also became somewhat of a love interest for the single and lonely Sheriff. The pacing was steady, which was something I especially enjoyed more than the first installment that tended to drag a little too much for my liking. The storyline was interesting, especially after Ethan began to suspect that the scene was not what it seemed, based on what he knew and remembered about Ty. The writing was good too, I liked how Chase kept the characters, as well as myself, guessing until almost the ending.

I’m looking at an overall rating of 4.1 that I will be rounding down to a 4star review. I want to thank NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for sending me this eARC in exchange for my honest review.

#NetGalley #CrookedLaneBooks #ALonsomePlaceforMurder

A Lonesome Place for Murder: An Ethan Brand Mystery by Nolan Chase is the sequel to A Lonesome Place for Dying. It, like that first book, is a really good read. You could read this one first, if you wanted, but why do that as the series is a good one and should be read in order like all good series.

As this book begins, Chief of Police Ethan Brand and Deputy Brenda Lee Page are slogging it out as they hike through a pasture. The mission is to find an old man and a certain horse. Both work for the small town of Blaine, Washington, near the border with Canada. They might not be the ones even out there now except for the fact that Chief of Police Brand is thinking about buying the horse. He had an appointment to see the horse and brought Deputy Brenda Lee Page with him, on her day off, as support as she knows animals. Not that she knows much about horses.

Brand’s ex and the kids live in Boston now and the most recent visitation did not go as well as he would have hoped. Both of his sons during the summer visitation were too immersed in their electronic devices when they were not actively doing something. That is except for one afternoon when they were able to interact with a horse in its trailer. The Christmas visitation is coming up and Brand is thinking that maybe a horse would help things. He wants his young sons to be present in the world and understand that there are things that matter far more than chatting online and playing videogames. He is feeling a growing gap between his sons and himself and is having a hard time with the dawning realization that his ex and his sons aren’t going to come back home.

The muddy and wet pasture they are slogging through has a slope to it as it sits parallel to the Canadian border. It is where they were sent by the owner’s wife to go check on him as he is overdue for getting back to the house. The slope and the wet ground are working Brand’s surgically repaired left foot and causing him increasing pain as he climbs steadily higher up the slope. The man they are looking for is Mac Steranko. Once they finally the crest and can look down the other side, towards the border, they can see him sitting on the ground near a patch of disturbed ground.

The elderly Mr. Steranko is a tough man and lucky to be alive. He is a bit banged up as is the horse, Trim Reckoning. It is favoring a leg and is a bit spooked by the hole in the ground. Mr. Steranko explains that the horse stumbled hard because a patch of ground suddenly gave way under it.

Even more ground gives way when Brenda Lee starts poking around and accidentally causes a bigger collapse. One that dumps her several feet down into a hole that is now several feet long. In fact, this is not a hole, but a partial tunnel collapse.

Back a few years earlier, Brand was in the military. One of his duties in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan was clearing tunnels. The last thing he wants to do is go down in that tunnel. But, when Brenda Lee finds a body in there that has been there for quite some time, he doesn’t have a choice.

A body that soon means quite a lot to Ethan Brand in more ways than one.

What follows is another highly entertaining and complicated read in this great series. Not only do they have a murder to solve, local politics is heating up, his ex has plans that don’t involve him, and history is rearing its ugly head. Much is going on professionally and personally and Ethan Brand is a bit like the dogged prize fighter that takes body blow and head shot, one after another, with barely any time to breathe as he leans against the ropes. Backed in a corner every which way, all he can do is keep his head down, and keep dodging that fatal blow. Or that head shot as the case may be.

A Lonesome Place for Murder: An Ethan Brand Mystery by Nolan Chase is a mighty good read. Very much strongly recommended as it is well worth your time.


My digital ARC reading copy came from the publisher, Crooked Lane Books, through NetGalley, with no expectation of a review.


Kevin R. Tipple ©2025

A Lonesome Place for Murder is book 2 of an Ethan Brand mystery series. This was a dark fictional mystery book that kept me engaged! It had both likable and unlikable characters in it, a well rounded plot and kept me wanting more of this detective mystery! I didn’t want it to end. Even though I wanted more, this book was ended up well executed. The main character Ethan Brand is a likable character, so I understood why the author wrote a second book! I am hoping that there will be a third one coming out as well.

The horse that Ethan Brand thinks about buying comes across a smuggling tunnel that had been abandoned. Him and his lead investigator end up finding a dead body there and that’s when things get really scary! This body identification is someone that Ethan knew many years ago. As the story unfolds, there are twists and turns you don’t see coming! Sinister things start to happen to Ethan! It is about a smuggling operation! I highly recommend this book to anyone that enjoys reading a great mystery with some thriller! Be sure to check out the trigger warnings before reading this book. I give this a 4 out of 5 star rating!

Thank you to NetGalley, author Nolan Chase and Crooked Lane Books for this digital advanced reader’s copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This book is expected to be published on August 26, 2025!