Review by Frank Plowright

As an old casino is being demolished for a new development a tourist thinks they saw a falling corpse when the implosion occurred, but their video footage is indistinct. Shortly afterward a tourist is found dead in a hotel room. They turn out to be the same man who went to the police.

As in the CSI TV show, Steven Grant’s plot keeps two concurrent mysteries bubbling as the forensic investigation team go about their specialist tasks. Nothing is ever simple in the CSI world, and Grant layers puzzle upon puzzle in what turns out to be a clever plot about family disagreements running out of control. He’s hampered, though, by having to produce so many pages of talking heads. On the TV show the technical explanations can be relatively smoothly incorporated into the remainder of the show, but their necessity in a graphic novel requires the imbalance of page after page of them.

It means Gabriel Rodriguez is given essentially the same scene with the same people to draw over and over again as they discuss evidence. While good, he’s not yet the exceptional artist who’d later draw Locke & Key, and he’s not able to bring enough variety to the explanation scenes. The likenesses of the cast are acceptable rather than instantly identifiable, but there are elements showing imagination, such as the grittier flashback scenes as the CSI team speculate about how crimes might have been committed.

Fans of the TV show ought to enjoy the complications and mysteries of Grant’s plot, and the way it unfolds, but Grant and Rodriguez never find a way of overcoming the limitations imposed by the format.