Review: One of the Better Ones
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 26, 2013
This guy first captures ones attention by his style. He writes straight from the hip, so to speak, no frills, no poeticism, little in the way of frills. This is appealing in a fiftyish sort of tale: a college instructor, part-time Private Investigator, finds himself in a tangled case of baby-selling, broken families, violence and murder. On the personal level, he is still trying to find his way back from the death of his wife and the resumption of some sort of normality, with a 17 year old daughter, who is a college student, as well as his unpaid, part-time assistant. He has no steady romantic ties. To add to the mix, he is partially of Native American heritage and  friendly with Native American police officers. As is often the case in such detective  stories, the simplified writing is utilized to create a complexity of identities and webs of violence and deceit. These intricacies the author handles well as he does the interpersonal aspects of his characters. The hero and  his daughter are well drawn as are some of the interrelated characters.All-in-all, a good addition to our private detective literature, the romantic realist literature, as Raymond Chandler defined it. Followers of the genre should like it; others may well do so.a pa