THE PONY CIRCUS WAGON

In this installment of the Bertrand McAbee Mystery series, the former classics professor and current private investigator is drawn into a cold case of theft and murder that spans generations and continents and finds roots in the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

When a colleague dies on a lonely road late at night under questionable circumstances, McAbee’s investigation turns up links to local thugs, the Chicago Mafia and even World War I war criminals. And as he untangles the web, McAbee discovers that at the heart of it all lies a priceless, jewel-encrusted Hapsburg heirloom—commissioned by the Archduke himself and not seen in almost 100 years—that, incredibly, may be hidden away in the state of Ohio, or may not exist at all. McAbee, a likable, albeit conflicted protagonist, goes out of his way to defy the hardboiled gumshoe stereotype: he drinks nonalcoholic beer, eschews the advances of beautiful women and steadfastly refuses to carry a gun, even when faced with obvious mortal danger. Given all this, one might reasonably expect a cerebral sequence in which McAbee shows his detective chops and gathers evidence, utilizes all his powers of observation to connect the dots and solves the mystery while the police are still scrambling to keep up. Instead, McAbee calls in a crack team of former SEALs to illegally and brutally torture information out of suspects by administering shocks to their nether-regions. He gets answers, but Sherlock Holmes he is not—this solution feels a bit unsatisfying and contrived. The hypocrisy is glaring, and one character briefly calls him out on it, but the reader never gets a straight answer about this contradiction, or an explanation of why an aging college professor has ready access to a torture-happy version of the A-Team. In McAbee we have a hero who won’t carry a gun for moralistic reasons, yet has no problem outsourcing torture. Despite this uneven characterization, McCaffrey (Scholarly Executions, 2005, etc.) keeps the plot moving at a good clip, ramping up tension while McAbee manages the diverse and bickering group of characters that comprises his investigative team. While the story takes place in the present day, the author utilizes flashbacks with several characters to 1914 pre-war Austria, 1920s Italy and the gangland Chicago of the ’40s to gradually parcel out all the clues. The pre-WWI historical background and international intrigue distinguish this gripping and at times addictive mystery from the standard whodunits.