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5.0étoiles sur 5
An Excellent Debut Novel, Jui 15 2004
I finished a great book yesterday, William Landay's debut,
_Mission Flats_. Set largely in a fictional Boston neighborhood,
it nevertheless reminded me a lot of Dennis Lehane's PI books.
Landay is a former DA from Boston, so I guess he has the background
to make things ring true.The book follows police chief Ben Truman, of Versailles (pronounced
"Ver-Sayles"), Maine, as he becomes involved in the investigation of
the murder of a Boston DA in a local lakefront cabin. Ben had been a promising graduate student in history when he left school to come
back home and help care for his mother, whose Alzheimer's has been
getting worse. Ben's dad, Claude, is the former police chief and
Ben takes a job with the department to give himself something to do.
Given his family, he is quickly made chief, one of the youngest in
the country, and has a fairly liberal attitude to the dispensation
of law and order. He certainly isn't ready for a homicide investigation
and the other investigators are fairly condescending to him. For some
reason, though, he feels a need to stay involved and, with the help of
a retired Boston police detective, John Kelly, he is tutored in the
workings of a real investigation. Evidence seems to point to a drug dealer, Harold Braxton, who has been
on the radar screens of detectives in the Mission Flats area for many
years, but who has managed to avoid having any charges stick to him.
About 10 years earlier, Braxton was the main suspect in the shooting death
of a Boston policeman during a drug raid, but a complicated series of
incidents lead to the case being dismissed. Now, once again, Braxton is
one of the main suspects in the killing of Bob Danziger, the DA, who might
have been digging into the earlier crime, intending to re-open the investigation. This was a great, compelling story, with a lot of insider information on how
the police work, particularly in setting up controlled buys, and so forth.
We are schooled in the workings of a major investigation, as well as the
political issues that run a case, along with Ben, who is deceptively naive.
Ben has several secrets of his own that come out in the course of the
investigation and prove to be potential bombshells. The ending, in particular,
is quite a surprise and requires us to completely revise our understanding of
Ben. He's a complicated character and, ultimately, not particularly likeable.
I don't think this will be the first in a series of Ben Truman mysteries. Still, Landay is a great writer and this is a memorable first novel. If you
like Lehane's Kenzie/Gennaro series, you'll probably like this, too. Highly
recommended.
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