A Change of Gravity
Let them talk. For 25 years, Higgins' novels have been built on this one simple principle--that you learn the most about people by listening to what they say and how they say it. His books move in sweeping, slowly inclining curves, like a highway gradually winding its way up a mountain, moving in one direction without ever seeming to be pointing there. As his characters talk to one another--never in the kind of staccato dialogue we expect in crime novels but, rather, through a civil exchange of rambling monologues--we often lose track of where we're heading or where we started from, but we never lose interest in the anecdote of the moment. That's as true as it's ever been in Higgins' latest, which begins as two old-style, bent but not crooked Massachusetts pols discover that the Feds are about to indict one of them. The charges against former state representative Dan Hilliard are ultimately bogus yet grounded in fact, leaving Hilliard and his loyal campaign manager, Ambrose Merrion, in a major pickle. Higgins' heroes are always people who work the trenches, whether in law, politics, or crime, and as they talk, their knowledge of those trenches seeps out like sweat. As Hilliard and Merrion talk, we like them more and more, and we recognize how different they are from the federal bureaucrats who hope to jail them. The Feds are shrewd, but they don't do trenches, and they never sweat. Give Higgins credit: it's not easy in 1997 to make sympathetic heroes out of a hard-drinking, womanizing politician and his foulmouthed henchman.Bill Ott