Review: A somewhat formulaic crime story
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 02 3, 2014
Jack Contino has retired from the Boston PD and intends to graze as Head of Detectives at the Dennis PD at Cape Cod. As it happens, he is the only detective, but since serious crime does not happen at Dennis, life should be easy. Unfortunately, a case turns up. A barman, Manny Duarte, leaves work, gets into his car, and someone in the back seat slits his throat. Jack has a case.Jack does what police ought to do: he interviews everybody who could reasonably be connected with Manny, and while he gets a lot of information, none of it is particularly useful. He comes across one person who is definitely not a nice person, he suspects him, but unfortunately he has an iron-clad alibi. Still, Jack is not one to give up. It is about then he realizes there was a similar murder in a nearby town six months previously, so he starts investigating that. Anything more would spoil it.This is a reasonably straightforward crime novel that does not make demands on the reader, the writing is easy to read and it flows well, although the characters are somewhat cardboard. As an example, Jack arranges for a young policewoman to do some surveillance. She gets murdered, and Jack shows almost no emotion at all. The way the police behave seems quite reasonable, but the ending had too much of the deus ex machina nature to satisfy me. It is a reasonably short novel, and if you do not mind a somewhat contrived ending and some cardboard, this is a reasonably good, if a little formulaic, read.