Review: Slight but Enjoyable Prequel to Mystery Series
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 12 25, 2013
Nick Stephenson's Paydown combines a lot of familiar story elements to make a mostly entertaining albeit slight novella that serves as a prequel to his Leopold Blake mystery series. Anyone who has seen TV shows like Castle, Elementary, Psych, and The Mentalist will recognize the characters right away. There's Blake himself, a filthy rich heir to a financial empire who serves as a consultant to the New York Police Department, his partner/liaison Mary Jordan, who supplies the sex appeal and frets a lot about how they will find admissible evidence they can use in court, and Jerome, Blake's bodyguard, who supplies the muscle to extricate Blake from jams.Because this is a novella and not a fullblown novel, the story line is fairly straightforward (the entire book seems like a pilot episode for a TV series in fact). Blake and Mary are investigating a Wall Street investment banker to see if he's on the up and up. When the man turns up murdered, they soon find that there's a lot of flim flammery involved in his firm's activities. In fact, their investigation winds up suggesting that the events in the book (which is set in 2007) had a direct impact on the world financial crisis a year later (Stephenson's attempt to tie the events in the book to the crisis aren't too effective).There's not a whole lot of room in a book this size to trot out multiple suspects and let Blake and company do too much legwork. There's still at least one good plot twist in the book and room for Jerome to engage in some well written fisticuffs. However, the story's resolution depends on Blake conveniently getting captured by villains who even more conveniently explain all the remaining plot details. In one of the book's more clever sequences, Stephenson actually gives Blake some dialogue that has an Austin Powers-like canniness as he spells out the clichéd events that are about to occur just a couple of pages before they actually do occur.Pilot episodes of TV series are rarely great drama by themselves, and this literary equivalent of a pilot is no exception. However, this book is a mildly amusing way to while away a couple of hours and spark interest in Blake's further exploits as detailed in Stephenson's other books. Personally, this was my first experience with Leopold Blake, and the book did succeed in that latter goal. I am definitely interested in seeing Blake and company tangle with a hopefully meatier and more involved story line.