It’s not the fly fishing, but the cast: good guys to root for, villains to hiss. Galligan (The Blood Knot, 2005, etc.) has...
Working in troubled waters, a peripatetic fly fisherman catches murder, romance and the occasional trout.
It’s been four years since Ned Ogilvie could think of himself as the husband, father and businessman he once was. A devastating family tragedy has propelled him into what he regards as an irrevocably altered state: “I am the Dog now. I am a trout hound. I fish, I drive, I fish, I drive, I fish.” Finding himself in picturesque Livingston, Mont., the Dog plans to plant his waders in the nearby Roam River, a fly-fishing Mecca. He’s temporarily sidetracked when Sneed and Jesse, a pair of engaging young lovers, attach themselves to him, making the Dog feel pleasantly avuncular and content just to hang out for a while. But Sneed is black, Jesse is white, and soon Livingston’s hate community takes notice. Jesse is murdered; Sneed is arrested; and the Dog knows the mighty Roam will have to wait longer. His task—to keep Sneed from being railroaded by reeling in the killer—is certainly challenging. But it turns out that the self-proclaimed trout hound has enough bloodhound in him to sniff out the dark stuff homicides are made of.
It’s not the fly fishing, but the cast: good guys to root for, villains to hiss. Galligan (The Blood Knot, 2005, etc.) has the knack.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60648-003-8
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Bleak House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2008
An ambitious and dauntingly convoluted noir-derived thriller from the author of The Elephant (1992) and the penitential memoir The Blue Suit (1995). Its protagonist and narrator, Billy McGrath, is a former philosophy student and now head of the LAPD's homicide division. Turned 40, divorced from the woman he still loves (herself a former cop, paralyzed in a shooting incident) and fumbling to be a decent father to his beloved preadolescent daughter, Billy takes very personally his latest case, the brutal torture murder of a local drug dealer's apparently innocent mother (``I thought,'' Billy muses, ``that if I could stop something like this from happening even once . . . then being a police officer would be worthwhile''). Not a chance. While compiling documentary evidence for the ``murder book'' the department keeps on (aforementioned victim) Mae Richards, Billy uncovers a snake's nest of erotic, political, and more generally criminal intrigue (not excluding his own corruptibility) that acquaints him with an O.J. Simpsonlike celebrity acquitted for his wife's murder, an obstetrician burdened by dubious medical (and other) ethics, and a wonderfully cold- blooded goon named Tookie Cross—and mushrooms into several more ingeniously nauseating killings. It's all highly readable, and quite capably plotted—despite embarrassingly close echoes of Chinatown, The Silence of the Lambs, any number of Dashiell Hammett novels, and, most egregiously, Richard Price's vastly superior Clockers. Furthermore, Billy McGrath is immensely likable in his innate decency and credibly human fallibility, but Rayner dilutes this fine characterization by allowing Billy to quote eminent sages at absurdly inappropriate junctures (e.g., while interrogating a suspect: ``Robert, do you know what Jung and William James had to say about human personality?''). Murder Book will make a hell of a TV miniseries, but it's too derivative and miscalculated to be a really effective novel. Not a bad try, but not the big one Rayner was obviously aiming for.
Pub Date: Oct. 22, 1997
ISBN: 0-395-83625-5
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
Munitions king Peyton Piper is used to being in control. He won't let the agitators protesting his continued manufacture of the Terrible Tommy land mine ruin the party he's planned to lay the foundations for his senatorial bid—although his overeager security guard Barry Nevins is courting a lawsuit thanks to his treatment of the protestors, and Peyton's 18-year-old daughter Paula is sleeping with the enemy. Even when Markham Swan, the philandering historian Peyton has hired to document the vital contributions of the Pipers to the Murphysville, Connecticut, economy, is found shot with two antique miniÇ balls, the manufacturer doesn't turn a hair; he merely purrs that Swan's wife Loyce had had enough of his affairs and decided to end all their problems with two shots. But when a note Swan sent to Paula warning of a threat to her life sends State Senator Bea Wentworth and her children's-book author Lyon (A Child's Garden of Death, 1975, etc.) off to investigate the family graveyard, they find evidence of a plot beyond even Peyton's ability to control—a plot reaching back to the Civil War that's led to the ``accidental'' miniÇ-ball shootings of five generations of Pipers at exactly Paula's age. . . . Neatly plotted, with a particularly deft use of the Piper family curse and the most surprising visit to a family tomb in years.
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15292-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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