From Booklist
Let them talk. For 25 years, Higgins' novels have been built on this one simple principle--that you learn the most about people by listening to what they say and how they say it. His books move in sweeping, slowly inclining curves, like a highway gradually winding its way up a mountain, moving in one direction without ever seeming to be pointing there. As his characters talk to one another--never in the kind of staccato dialogue we expect in crime novels but, rather, through a civil exchange of rambling monologues--we often lose track of where we're heading or where we started from, but we never lose interest in the anecdote of the moment. That's as true as it's ever been in Higgins' latest, which begins as two old-style, bent but not crooked Massachusetts pols discover that the Feds are about to indict one of them. The charges against former state representative Dan Hilliard are ultimately bogus yet grounded in fact, leaving Hilliard and his loyal campaign manager, Ambrose Merrion, in a major pickle. Higgins' heroes are always people who work the trenches, whether in law, politics, or crime, and as they talk, their knowledge of those trenches seeps out like sweat. As Hilliard and Merrion talk, we like them more and more, and we recognize how different they are from the federal bureaucrats who hope to jail them. The Feds are shrewd, but they don't do trenches, and they never sweat. Give Higgins credit: it's not easy in 1997 to make sympathetic heroes out of a hard-drinking, womanizing politician and his foulmouthed henchman.
Bill Ott
From Kirkus Reviews
A retrospective look, courtesy of a million patented Higgins conversations, at 40 years of corrupt Massachusetts politics. The day of judgment has come for Daniel Hilliard. Even though a flamboyant series of marital infidelities drove him out of the state senate in 1984--he's been cooling his heels ever since as president of Hampton Pond Community College--prosecutors think they've found a way to nail him for the gentlemanly bribes and kickbacks he made a way of life for 25 years. Unlikable Arnie Bissell plans to give Hilliard's right-hand man, district court clerk Ambrose Merrion, immunity so he'll have to testify about the Fourman Realty Trust, a sweetheart deal Merrion inherited a share of from his predecessor, Larry Lane, a virtuoso wheeler- dealer whose little economies with public money have grown enough (inflation and compound interest having worked their miracles) for Merrion to keep Hilliard in the toney, and actionably expensive, Grey Hills Country Club long past his retirement from the senate--and past the date when the statute of limitations has run out on his other alleged defalcations. Will Merrion be forced to drag years of good-natured mischief into the open by rolling over on his best friend? Higgins stretches this short-story idea to the length of a Victorian monstrosity by the simple expedient of reporting exhaustively on every person who's ever swum in Hilliard's waters. Subsidiary characters--e.g., the family of Julian Sanderson, the golf pro who urges Hilliard through the mysteries of Grey Hills--sprout as alarmingly as kudzu, till even Merrion wonders about Julian: ``Why is he on this planet? What the hell is he for?'' With the sociological grasp of Trollope and Thackeray, but with a distinctly postmodern sense of architecture--he circles around subplots long after you've forgotten why they ever came up--Higgins (Sandra Nichols Found Dead, 1996, etc.) has produced his most ambitious, and infuriating, book in years. --
Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
