The standout entry in 1985's Best Mystery and Suspense Stories of the Year was Block's "By the Dawn's Early Light," in which dour shamus Matt Scudder (Eight Million Ways to Die) recalled the bygone case that disillusioned him forever. Here, however, that powerful story is insensitively recycled and sadly diluted—in a padded, makeshift novel that patches together two unrelated, small-scale plot lines. Both stories do emerge from the same milieu: the mid-1970's on Manhattan's boozy West Side, where ex-cop Matt (hurting from his recent divorce) does lots of serious, all-night drinking. At one after-hours joint, a tough Irish spot called Tim Pat's, Matt witnesses a daring holdup by masked men—and is later asked to track down the robbers' identities. But he has hardly a clue until these thieves strike again: they steal incriminating documents from the office of Matt's drinking-buddy Skip Devoe, holding them for ransom. And some similarities between the two crimes lead Matt to realize that the robbers have a secret accomplice—someone who has been guilty of betraying his friends (a recurring theme here). The other story (the one on better display in "By the Dawn's Early Light") involves another drinking buddy, salesman Tommy Tillary—boozy, 45, a philanderer with a Manhattan girlfriend and a Brooklyn wife. So, when Tommy becomes a suspect in the murder of his wife, it's up to Matt to help prove that the real killers were a pair of Puerto Rican burglars. Block shuffles the two story-lines together competently; the mixture is further thickened with vignettes from Matt's private life—his affair with Tommy's girlfriend, his weekend fatherhood. But both plots suffer from the slack, attenuated structure. And though heavy promotion (with the imminent arrival of a Matt Scudder film) may attract a large audience to the talented Mr. Block, this pseudo-novel—despite strong dialogue and atmosphere—isn't a fair representation of his customary, succinct gift for storytelling.
Pub Date: April 1, 1986
ISBN: 0380728257
Page Count: 387
Publisher: Arbor House
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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