Review: Heaven’s Debris by Suzan Denoncourt

A tangled mystery of desire, deception, loyalty, and sisterhood, Heaven’s Debris (Cisco Series Book 2) by Suzan Denoncourt is a stark and gritty portrait of guilty consciences teetering on the edge.

When her seven-story apartment building mysteriously crashes to the ground, Faye is devastated in multiple ways, particularly because her sister’s husband Gerry was waiting secretly inside for Faye to return, and continue their torrid love affair. Day by day, Faye’s internal torment grows, but when Gerry is miraculously rescued from the rubble, he becomes a media darling, and his inexplicably naked presence in the condo leads to questions that Faye will do anything to avoid. The fact that she volunteered to be a surrogate for Gerry and her sister, but may already be pregnant with his child, complicates the story’s twisted dynamic even further.

Detective Max Cisco is brought on to dig through the mystery of the tragic collapse and its unexpected victims – including a sex offender who may have more victims – putting the relentless sleuth squarely in the middle of this deceitful love triangle. With every drama-tuned eye in America turned in Faye and Gerry’s direction, they must eliminate evidence, dodge suspicion, and subtly craft an elaborate house of lies that seems destined to crumble, leaving readers hanging at the edge of each chapter, waiting for the explosive truth to finally come out.

A police procedural combined with a taut family drama, this thriller pulses with emotional tension and intense moral quandaries without clear solutions, capturing the raw desperation of someone whose life is currently falling apart, providing realistic glimpses into Faye’s very human turmoil and depths of regret. Combining the fierce love of a sister with the deepest kind of betrayal, Denoncourt creates space in the narrative for unflinching conversations about adultery, the devastating consequences of deceit between loved ones, and the danger in trusting anyone who seems too good to be true.

For a detective thriller, Denoncourt makes an interesting choice to give so much backstory access to readers, while keeping so many of the characters in the dark, but this flip in the genre script makes for an immersively dramatic read. The narration is consistently slow and methodical, which helps to build a very tangible world around Faye, Darcey, Gerry, and Max, while the dialogue is sharp, believable, and organic, laced with realistic slang and colloquialisms, and flavored by flashes of brilliant description that bring a character or emotion to visceral life.

When character development is so key to the story, however, the weaker elements tend to stand out, and some readers may raise an eyebrow at certain storylines, such as Darcey’s persistent lack of suspicion, or Charles Pender and his string of pseudo-families. While Pender is justification for Detective Cisco’s involvement in the case, and overlaps with some themes from the main plot, the story feels like a less compelling arc, and somewhat distracting from the core drama. When the two parallel stories eventually tangle, it spikes the tension for everyone involved, but readers don’t necessarily have as many reasons to be invested in Pender’s case.

Overall, this intimate and intense novel is uniquely enveloping, as it pushes readers to investigate and unpack their own baggage, which is rare to find in a thriller, and especially rare to find handled with such delicacy.