THE NATURE OF MIDNIGHT

Could someone really be so angry because the post office screwed up their mail delivery that he’d march over and kill the postmistress and a customer who just happened to be there?

Intrepid postal inspectors Max Dombrowski and Gillian Loomis, sent to teeny Norris, Montana, to handle the murders of poor old Mildred and passing customer Earl Stringer, quickly earn the enmity of county sheriff Andrew Binney, who thinks he’s got the case wrapped up. He’s wrong, of course, as Dombrowski and Loomis (Agent of Judgment, not reviewed, etc.) show by tying the murders in to the theft of three letters from 1918 that Mildred tried to deliver after she found them behind an old safe. In tracking down the letters, the agents attract the attention of several dastardly types at the British embassy as well as some unhealthy interest from the US Secret Service, some of whose members have been busy tossing motel rooms, shooting up the citizenry, and covering up Something Big. Two of the letters surface, but the race is on for the third. The key to all the mayhem seems to be an ancient confession from Sharpless Walker, who insisted he was duped into sinking the Lusitania.

Dombrowski, trying to win back his wife, and Loomis, desperate to redeem herself in her father’s eyes, are beset by melodramatic plot twists usually associated with daytime soaps: that’s not to say they’re uninteresting, merely improbable.