An engrossing and well-crafted riff on the tough-guy PI novel.
In Cohen’s debut detective novel, a down-on-his-luck private investigator takes on his former in-laws.
It’s 1952 in Cleveland, and Benjamin Gold has had a rough decade. Once a talented attorney, he was traumatized by his service in World War II and a subsequent stay in a psychiatric ward. Afterward, his law firm let him go, and then his wife left him. Forced to work as a private investigator, he spends much of his time at the bottom of a bottle. Then, one day, a beautiful woman walks into his office: Judith Sorin, the daughter of the legendary lawyer to the downtrodden Maury Sorin. Maury was recently shot dead in what was ruled a routine robbery, but Judith suspects that it was actually an assassination. What’s more, she thinks that the wealthy Forsythe family—Gold’s ex-in-laws—ordered the hit. To get to the bottom of what happened, Gold will have to dig up more information on a Forsythe-related case that Maury was working on. Gold jumps at the chance to get back at the family that shunned him because of his Jewish heritage, but to do so, he’ll have to wade through a shady underworld in which industry, politics, the law, and the street intertwine. Can Gold keep it together and solve the case? Cohen’s curt, rapid prose, as narrated by Gold, fits squarely within the hard-boiled tradition. For example, at one point, Gold wonders why the powerful family hasn’t yet tried to “bump [him] off”: “Then again, there could’ve been a gunman waiting for me that very moment outside the building. The thought got the sweat glands pumping.” The distinct midcentury Cleveland setting and Gold’s memories of liberating the Ebensee concentration camp give the novel a memorable sense of gravity throughout. The plot remains true to private-eye genre tropes, but Cohen introduces enough surprises and human touches to keep the reader invested in how it all ends up.
An engrossing and well-crafted riff on the tough-guy PI novel.Pub Date: March 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-948403-50-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kasva Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
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