When the Smoke Cleared
A Murder Mystery in Malden
When the Smoke Cleared is a thorough true crime book that examines a gripping murder case.
Retired Massachusetts detective Bill Powers’s procedural true crime book When the Smoke Cleared tracks the details of a murder investigation in a Boston suburb.
Powers handled numerous murder investigations in his time with the Massachusetts State Police; this book covers one such case. In 2000, Powers received a call about a suspicious fire in Malden that may have been set to cover a murder. The wheels of justice begin their slow turn through evidence collection and interviews with building tenants, leading at last to an unmarked grave in New Hampshire, an arrest, and a murder trial.
Powers recalls the details of the case, in which dozens of professionals, including firefighters, fire investigators, canine handlers, DNA experts, rank-and-file police officers, prosecutors, and detectives, investigated the initial scene. Powers gives each one of them space in consideration of their meticulous work, though this choice slows the book’s pace to the extent that the victim is only identified after a bevy of this detailed information about the investigators (and, in some cases, details of unrelated cases those professionals were handling at the same time). Indeed, the book even describes some information as “monotonous and wearisome,” noting that “it wasn’t overly relevant.”
Once the victim—fourteen-year-old Kelly Hancock—is identified, the book flowers into a human-interest story. Kelly is fleshed out as a girl with more than one side to her: a chronic runaway who nevertheless loved her family and often snuck home to see her siblings. A detail at her grave site resonates through the book: an intact red ponytail, secured with a scrunchie—a continual reminder of her youth and innocence that motivated investigators to see her story through to its conclusion. An ADA is assigned to the case and begins to gather evidence against a suspect to present to a grand jury.
Tension is generated by the book’s revelation that the evidence at hand was all circumstantial. There were no witnesses to the murder, and the suspect, who had access to the room where the murder took place and could be placed at the scene, did not confess. His criminal record and conversations with other inmates are recorded to proffer a sense of who he was, though in blocks of dialogue that are somewhat unnatural outside of their local slang (“it’s going to be a pissah of a story”). Attention to the Boston setting is evident in Powers’s descriptions of its landscape and weather, too, as of the rocky soil and the spring thaw—both relevant to the discovery of Kelly’s body.
Written with authority and respect for all law enforcement roles, When the Smoke Cleared is a thorough true crime book that examines a murder case and the procedures that led to conviction.
Reviewed by
Michele Sharpe
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
