Review: Just barely works
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 09 29, 2011
As far as a quick story to kill a few minutes, I would recommend this story.  However, to make this truly enjoyable, I'd suggest a few changes to subsequent stories.The main character is an Irish immigrant private eye who is pretending to be a hard-on-his-luck New Yorker.  It's an unusual circumstance, but the author doesn't really demonstrate how it shapes the character at all - it's easy to forget you're not reading a short story about a regular old hardboiled private eye in New York.  The character seems very "off the rack" - he doesn't like fancy food, he drives a beat-up car, he doesn't want anything in his coffee, etc.  Maybe subsequent stories could develop this character, but there was nothing in this story to tell me why I should want to read about this character instead of any of the other million hardboiled private eyes out there.His detecting style was also very non-descript.  He seems to luck into most of his clues - and not in an interesting or flashy way either.  I was also confused by how he came to get the case in the first place.  He's a private eye investigating a serial killer at the request of a police detective.  Is he getting paid by the state?  Do they have a special relationship?  How does a private eye become an adjunct of the police force?  Usually when this happens in a detective story, there is a reasoning behind it - the private eye is hired by a friend/relative of a victim because they're unhappy with progress made by the police or the police bring them in because of a special level of expertise.  None of that is explained here, yet the main character makes references to how he usually works with case files.If this was a longer novel, the slightness of the characters and plot would be enough to sink it.  As a shorter story, this works . . . but just barely.