PASTOR WATERS' DAUGHTER

In Ojih’s debut mystery novel, a newspaper editor gets entangled in a murder investigation.

It’s 1975, andHarry Robertsonworks as the news editor for a small newspaper in the sleepy Baltimore suburb of Middle River, Maryland. The paper is owned by the wealthy Rev. Reginald Waters, who also happens to be Harry’s pastor. One day, Harry, who’s on the cusp of a promotion, gets an unusual request from the reverend, who is about to leave for Europe for several months: He needs Harry to pick up his daughter from the airport and drive her to the family’s large estate. It turns out that Harry and Brittany Waters, a recent college dropout, have palpable sexual chemistry. Although he’s afraid that word will get back to the pastor, Harry sleeps with Brittany and agrees to meet her in Atlantic City, New Jersey, later that summer. Later, he learns that she was possibly involved with a Trenton gangster who was murdered a few years earlier. Still, Harry heads out to see her, but he discovers her corpse in the backyard of the house she’s rented. Harry quickly flees, reasonably sure that nobody will know he was there, and heads back to Middle River. Soon, police discover Brittany’s body, and Harry finds himself at the center of a swarm of reporters, cops, politicians, and mobsters, each with their own motivations and loyalties. Can Harry keep himself out of jail and help identify the real killer? He quickly comes to understand something his father said to him long ago: “Nobody chooses the devil, son; the devil chooses you.”

Harry’s story features many of the classic tropes that fans of noirish mysteries will enjoy: a femme fatale, political intrigue, and a shocking murder in a lonely beach house. However, the novel’s momentum is often impeded by distracting details. For example, Harry works for the tiny Middle River Times, and the promotion he’s angling for is at the paper’s satellite office in Trenton; it’s never explained why a local Maryland paper has a second office in a different and nonadjacent state. The author also shows a lack of facility with conversational speech and, especially, figurative language: “I’m as unwelcome to her as an outbreak of Ebola fever,” Brittany says at one point, and a bit later, Harry awkwardly narrates, “From my personal experience with women, I have come to conclude that a relationship with a woman like Brittany is like food in a microwave oven: it can turn from lukewarm to scalding hot in a matter of a few days.” In addition, Harry, who seems more concerned about his own job security than the fact that a woman he knew is dead, comes off as a far less sympathetic protagonist than the author seems to mean him to be. The overall plot is convoluted, and the stakes for the various characters are often unclear. In the end, the novel never finds the sort of smooth momentum that appeals to longtime mystery readers.

A confused and ultimately unsatisfying mystery thriller.