DEATH COMES DUE

A former prisoner must team up with a police investigator to solve the mystery of his friend’s abduction in this crime novel.

A man called Monster-Boy, “a near giant with a face like a child” and “a mouthful of misshapen teeth,” hates ex-con James Beck—so much so that he installs a closed-circuit TV camera to watch Beck’s home in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn; abducts his friend Manny Guzman; and taunts him with graphic images of violence and cryptic messages via text. As Beck tries to uncover the true identity of his enemy, he crosses paths with New York City cop Dianne Brennan, who’s investigating the second of two vicious homicides. In this third installment of the James Beck mystery series, Clarkson includes vivid descriptions of violence as well as strong language, but it never seems gratuitous given the author’s fidelity to the hard-boiled crime genre and the language of prison culture. Beck went to prison for manslaughter because of his involvement in a bar fight that led to a police officer’s death, and his past provides the novel’s core secrets. Chapters alternate between Monster-Boy’s machinations, Beck and his friends’ attempt to locate Manny, and Brennan’s pursuit of Beck to solve her two homicides; in the best hard-boiled tradition, the cops are always one step behind the amateur-detective protagonist. Clarkson includes some scenes of lighthearted banter, such as the exchange between Brennan and another cop about breakfast: “ ‘What did you get?’ ‘Some sort of egg and muffin thing. With bacon.’ ‘Really?’…‘Don’t get too excited. They’re microwaved.’ ” He also shows himself to be well versed in weaponry, as when a character loads “six Winchester PDX1 12-gauge defender shells into the Remington.” Such touches of realism will satisfy genre aficionados.

A swift-moving and cinematic thriller.