Review: Make or Break
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 11 11, 2013
The Umbrella Man is the second novel in the Singapore Inspector Samuel Tay series by Jake Needham. Tay, a twenty-year veteran of the Special Investigations Section of the Singapore police CID, wakes one morning to the news that terrorist attacks have occurred at three of the US named hotels in his city, with explosions causing major damage at all three sites. Racing to the area to help, Tay is injured himself spending a short time in one of the hospitals crammed with victims of the terrorism. When he regains consciousness, Tay expects to recover and play a role in finding the terrorists and bringing them to justice. Instead, he is forbidden by his CID supervisor, from having anything to do with the case. Tay's activity involving the US embassy and the CIA in a prior case has gained him a reputation of being a loose cannon by the The Internal Security Division of the Ministry of Home Affairs, a government organization that supersedes the authority of the police in Singapore.To get Tay out of the way, he is given a case involving the murder of an unidentified man in The Woodlands, a government planned housing project outside the main city. Tay has a feeling that the dead man is connected to the bombings though no one else sees it. As Tay and his subordinate Sergeant Kang investigate the crime, they uncover the identity of the dead man and discover a connection to Tay's father, dead now for 40 years. Approaching age 50, Tay discovers information about his father that changes his view of the past and forces him to re-examine his life.The appeal of this second episode of the Tay series is that the reader learns more about the personal history of the inspector that explains his motivations, strengths, and weaknesses as a man and police official. I had a very different picture of Tay in this novel compared to the one I saw in volume 1 of the series,THE AMBASSADOR'S WIFE (An Inspector Samuel Tay Novel). The Umbrella Man created more questions to understanding the complex character than it provided answers leaving me no choice but to read volume 3, when it is available. That is definitely something to look forward to. Tay is a hard man to like, but the more the reader knows about him, the more interesting he becomes. Readers should read volume 1 (with a better structure than this novel) first to get basic background on the inspector.