I had been waiting eagerly for an eighth book in the "Badge of Honor" series for a few years now. I'd figured Griffin would continue the series by skipping ahead a few months and picking up the action somewhere in the mid-1970s, where the seventh book left off.
What I wasn't expecting was a book that's written with the main characters being the same ages as they were before, but the book's action taking place in the present. Griffin has skipped ahead through nearly 30 years of time but clearly states several times throughout the book that only a few months (possibly up to six) have passed since the action of the seventh book ended.
This means that characters now are constantly using cell phones, which are common nowadays but were nonexistent when the series left off in book 7 -- and which they never used in the books up to and including the seventh. It means characters drive cars and trucks that are mentioned by explicit make and model and that exist only now, but were unheard of (even undreamed of) in the 1970s (think SUVs).
I also found jarring the fact that many key players from previous books are absent, without explicit explanations for the changes. For example, Jerry Carlucci, the mayor of Philadelphia through the first seven books, is gone. He's mentioned once or twice, but he's no longer the mayor. I remember a brief mention that indicated he may have been elected to the US Senate, but in the previous books he was always concerned with RE-ELECTION, not with election to an entirely different level of government.
Similarly, the police commissioner is gone (a bit more easily explained, as that's a political appointment and the commissioner serves at the mayor's pleasure); the district attorney is gone; and a few other characters suffer similar fates.
Finally, the book is [filled] with errors of continuity. Matt Payne's elimination from the Marine Corps is explained in this book as a problem with his ear; in the first seven books, it was a problem with his eye. He was only promoted to detective a short time before his promotion to sergeant in the eighth book, and the series has made it plain that such promotion opprotunities rest on passing of examinations that are held only every couple of years, and that not everyone qualifies even to take those tests each time. So Payne's somewhat stellar rise through the ranks goes against the procedures and standards Griffin has described in the series up to and including the seventh book.
One character who was explicitly removed from the police force is back in this book: Wilson Carter. In the fifth book, he left the police force; now he's a sergeant and there's no indication he was ever out of the Highway Patrol.
All that said, I found the book to be an engaging read. Griffin's style always engages me, and though I do often find a lot of his dialog difficult to believe (I doubt people really talk like the characters in his book), I usually finish the books within a day or two. This one took me a week because I read it during a vacation, and only a few dozen pages at a time. And it ended very abruptly, which I'm sure is meant to set up another book, but it left me unsatisfied.
