Review: Burnside Is Back--and Even Better--in Fade Route
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 31, 2013
David Chill's Fade Route, the second novel in his series featuring ex-cop, ex-college football player turned PI Burnside, represents an enjoyable improvement over his promising debut Post Pattern. This time out, Burnside, whose business isn't going all that well, is volunteering at an outreach center for the homeless when he is approached by the center's owner, who wants Burnside to look into an attempted assault on his wife. However, before he can tell Burnside any more details, he is murdered in the center's offices, and Burnside decides to look into the case out of a sense of obligation to the victim, even though there's no paying client involved.There are suspects aplenty here, both personal (the victim was an avid womanizer) and professional (he was also running for mayor against a possible crooked incumbent), and there's soon a second murder as well, that of a homeless man who was getting help at the shelter and may have witnessed too much. And since the local cops aren't keen on investigating a crime that may implicate the current mayor, Burnside is pretty much on his own.I liked Post Pattern but found that Chill tried to mimic classic hardboiled detective writers like Raymond Chandler a bit too much. In this book, Chill is much more successful in cutting the apron strings and making Burnside his own distinct character. There are a couple of good passages showing Burnside helping out at the outreach center, where he and the other volunteers try to help the homeless clean themselves up and find real work rather than just dishing out handouts. It's clear Burnside really cares, and, apparently so does Chill. There's also some good local political intrigue as well as the book exposes the seamy side of Bay City (a fictionalized version of Santa Monica) quite nicely. There's also some nice byplay between Burnside and several of the (naturally) quite attractive women in the book, but this time around Burnside has a girlfriend so he's only a quite astute but detached commentator on the physical and romantic relationships among the characters.Chill still relies a bit too much on the clichés in a couple of places, most notably in his depiction of the local cops, who seem inclined to want to lock Burnside up and throw away the key mainly because that's what cops in hardboiled novels always do. They also go around referring to him as "pally" and threatening to have him "spend some time in the hoosegow." Fortunately, Chill gets the bad clichés out of the way early in the novel, and the last two-thirds of the book has a number of astute and often witty observations.Post Pattern was enjoyable, but nothing more than a simple mystery. The mystery in Fade Route is fairly good as well (although experienced readers should have no trouble spotting the killer by the halfway point in the book), but Chill has opened up the book even more into a good character study and look at the seamy side of the greater Los Angeles scene. Burnside is rapidly becoming his own man as a PI, and Chill is becoming his own man as an author as well.