Category Archives: Fiction

Down and Out in the River City by Wm Stage

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Down and Out in the River City, the third crime thriller by Wm Stage, is a refreshing change of pace in both setting and characters, with a strong feel of gritty reality. Contemporary society’s schisms and Americans’ careless assumptions and prejudices are on full display. This well-paced story puts St. Louis, Mo., special process server Francis Lenihan in the precarious position of having to break the law if he wants a devious serial killer to get justice. St. Louis has as many swirling currents as the mighty Mississippi flowing alongside it, and some are just as dangerous.

River City is one of the city’s many nicknames. A good bit of the action takes place in a homeless encampment that has sprung up in the riverside park surrounding the city’s most famous manmade attraction—the Gateway Arch. Stage doesn’t neglect the city’s troubled racial history, notably the 2014 death of Michael Brown by police in nearby Ferguson. That event created the backdrop of interracial resentments, fear, and anger for this story’s opening.

When Lenihan walks out of the Civil Courts Building, he finds himself in the midst of an incipient riot. A former police officer accused of murdering a 24-year-old Black man has just been acquitted. Caught up in the melee, Lenihan is rounded up with everyone else, and must sit in jail until he can be processed.

Lenihan’s views on this and other examples of racial discord are not easy to pigeonhole. He seems to be on first one side, then the other. Maybe at all times he’s simply on the side that will give him the quickest path out of it. What I particularly valued in this book is that, through Lenihan and the people he drinks with, you hear the full range of attitudes about race and social issues, for better and worse. It’s no shade of polemical.

Lenihan works for the sheriff’s office, delivering legal papers to people involved in landlord disputes, divorces, court cases, and the like. As you can imagine, although a process server has no authority to arrest people, the recipients of these notices can be unhappy to see him. Lenihan goes about his day-to-day work during the course of the story and how he works is an interesting window on a behind-the-scenes job.

The story starts in earnest when Lenihan receives a call from the father of a young murder victim. Lenihan’s business card was in the dead man’s pocket. The father wants to know more about his son’s last days and, desperate, asks Lenihan to investigate. This takes him to the homeless encampment, where Lenihan hopes to pick up the young man’s trail. There, Lenihan connects with a Black preacher named Cleo looking for his brother. Through Cleo, Lenihan meets some of the colorful characters who make the camp their home. Chasing down fragments of information of wildly varying reliability leads in a direction that threatens Lenihan himself. I liked this book a lot. The setting and characters are fresh and well-developed, and a nuanced understanding of the process server’s life grows out of author Stage’s own background as a licensed process server in St. Louis.

“Swing for the Fences”

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George Saunders,

Having a Marie Kondo moment, I’ve been clearing out old magazines, giving one last nostalgic look-through. We’re talking copies of Gourmet that go back over 50 years (before food processors, anyway), a magazine that ceased publication 16 years ago. There’s a stab of pleasure in seeing my notes written alongside recipes I cannot recall ever preparing (“good!” “this process works!” “too salty” “not as good as it should have been”).

I have a long shelf full of the short story magazine Glimmer Train too (1990-2019). At one point, every quarterly issue. It was hard to get through them, and I tended to read the stories and skip the interviews. I wasn’t writing my own fiction then, so they didn’t necessarily land with me. Now they do.

Winter 2015, the interview was with the wonderful George Saunders, lecturer and author, who won the Man Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and wrote the absolutely-worth-reading-again A Swim in A Pond in the Rain, which dissects short stories of four Russian masters and why they work.

Glimmer Train interviewer David Naimon asked Saunders how he achieves his remarkable fictional “voice.” It was hard, Saunders answered, until he decided to loosen up and “just be funny, a little pop culture-ish, to be sci-fi.” While the stories may be dark, he’s trying to put his fictional world into some extreme circumstance “where things are going really badly, and then just see how people behave.” Not that well, as you’d guess.

His stories are infused with verbal energy, pizzazz. If you’ve read Bardo, you’ll remember how the multiple conversations among the dead are lively and often hilarious. It’s a performance, and a high-wire one at that. He believes that resorting to “extraordinary means” of entertainment are necessary to get readers beyond the surface, down to some truth about life.

There are certainly tropes in every genre—romance, mystery, etc. Some readers may find them comforting—they know how a story is likely to develop (and end); others grow to find them boring. For my taste, the domestic thriller/untrustworthy spouse tropes have become tired, as has the “collection of old friends who meet up in a place where they are cut off by weather or whatever, secrets come out, and people start dying.”

Saunders is often accused of being experimental, which we can think of as “not ordinary and trope-stuffed,” and he cites his teacher Tobias Wolfe as believing “all good writing is experimental, because, if not, why would you do it? If you aren’t venturing into something new, why bother?”

In other words, a good writer would not ride the trends, attempting to suss out the “next big thing” that will be the key to getting published. (Teenage vampires—I’ll do that!) These days, the chances are so low that a new writer or even a mid-list writer will get or keep a major publisher, and so low that a self-published book will become a best-seller, why not just swing for the fences? Figure out what you’re good at, says Saunders, whether it’s creating physical detail, plotting, creating characters, or whatever you do that has some energy behind it and play to your strength

“A Visit to the Lucentini Museum of Curiosities”

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Now here’s a trip to a museum that didn’t turn out as expected! “A Visit to the Lucentini Museum of Curiosities” was published in the latest issue of the antholozine Soul Scream: Fear and Loathing, edited by Christopher Ryan. In it, you find out about a mysterious lower west side Manhattan museum that no one wants to talk about–and why.

Horror is not a genre I usually read, so I was surprised to find that some of the stories in this issue could certainly fit in the best crime publications, and the futuristic take of some other tales made them good candidates for the sci-fi category. My story, about a young couple’s ill-fated museum visit, leads off the collection, and I’m pleased to be included with authors who have such rich imaginations!

While most of the stories are definitely inspired by troubling aspects of our current political moment, some focus a little more broadly on the fundamental dilemmas of being human. Stressful times just make those dilemmas worse. To his great credit, Ryan included work from seasoned writers as well as talented high school students. What a thrill it must be for them to see their words in such an impressive collection! (I remember the shock when I sold my first short story. I cried.) Some collection highlights for me, out of many:

“School’s Out for Summer” by Wendy Maxon – a roller coaster operator relies on the technology to operate his coaster, but when it fails, what will he do about all those people hanging upside down? This story reminded me of people who use GPS to get to jobs they’ve held for years . . .

“Anguish Art Showcase” by Rebecca Cuthbert – expresses everything I hate about reality television, taken to its extreme.

“Jim Crow: 2028” by Steven Van Patten – although the story has a lot of “message,” the author was so skilled at building tension, I had to take a couple of breaks when reading it!

“Final Advice” by Charles Barouch – though times are desperate and uncertain, there’s still room for a hero.

Each story or poem is followed by a short commentary from Soul Scream staff along with a few questions to the author about the work’s origins and development. This was fun company to be in!

Order it here from Amazon!

A Murderous Reading Vacation–Right in Your Own Back Yard

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So your friends are off to the Jersey Shore or Thailand or the Maritime Provinces. You can have your own exciting vacation right from the ol’ lounge chair. Here are five recent crime stories that will give you a taste of sea, sand, and foreign climes.

Pele’s Prerogative by Albert Tucher
If a Hawai`i vacation is just what you need, you’ll find plenty of local color to make you think you’ve vacationed in that island paradise. Pele, you’ll recall, is the goddess of volcanoes and fire who created the Hawaiian Islands. The flowing lava creates lava tubes, akin to cave systems. Seventy-three-year-old Langston Otsaka, is found dead at the bottom of a lava tube in his back yard, and the wound on the back of his head suggests it wasn’t an accidental. Read my full review here.

Runaway Horses by the Italian literary duo Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini
Lawyer Enzo Maggioni and his wife Valeria, traveling to Siena, encounter a violent hailstorm, take a wrong turn, and end up at an enormous villa, where they remain guests for several days. They’ve arrived shortly before Siena’s August Palio, a centuries-old event in which horses race three laps around the town’s Piazza del Campo. The competition is vigorous and not always fair. Then there’s the dead jockey in the library. My full review is here.

Killer Potential by Hannah Deitch
This story sneaks up on you and before long has its claws in you good and solid. From the moment Evie Gordon walks up to her clients’ quirky Southern California mansion and finds the front door wide open, you know she’s about to uncover something better avoided. A young woman is tied up inside, and Evie’s employers are dead. When suspicion falls on the two women, they go on the run across the US—a 2025 Thelma and Louise. Here’s the full review.

Sayulita Sucker by Craig Terlson
In this story, set in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, you’ll visit back alleys and dicey neighborhoods not featured in any guidebook. Luke Fischer barrels through the pages as unstoppable as a locomotive. He’s not always polite, prefers beer to wine, and raises a dust storm wherever he goes. Yet, he has an uncanny knack for finding missing people. This time, his client is a man whose teenager daughter has disappeared. Full review here.

Murder Takes a Vacation by Laura Lippman
The acclaimed author’s first cozy mystery is a delight. Muriel Blossom, widowed and newly wealthy, has planned her first trip to Europe—Paris and a splurgy river cruise. You might suspect that Lippman has an older auntie or family friend who inspired her to so perfectly create open-hearted, naïve Mrs. Blossom. From the first page, you’ll peg her as the inevitable victim of an assortment of solicitous character. Read the full review.

reading, apple

Another Winner from Tim Sullivan

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When I scan the list of books I’ll be reviewing in the next few months for crimefictionlover.com, I’m thrilled when I see one of Tim Sullivan’s entertaining murder mysteries coming up. The series, each entry titled with the profession of the victim, proves no occupation is safe from murderous impulses. His latest is The Bookseller. You might think a bookseller, particularly one whose esoteric specialty is dusty rare books and first editions, couldn’t rile anybody up to the point of murder, but Ed Squire appears to have done just that.

In this story, Detective Sergeant George Cross, somewhere on the autism spectrum, again burnishes his reputation as an investigative bulldog. Once George’s jaws latch onto a case, he isn’t letting it go until he’s absolutely and completely satisfied the right perpetrator has been brought to justice. This is good for justice and frustrating for his colleagues in the Avon and Somerset Major Crimes Unit, who meanwhile have been barking up a great many wrong trees and just want to move on.

Of course, George and his partner, Josie Ottey, would find it easier to quickly home in on the proper suspect if victims didn’t tend to go through life accumulating a significant array of enemies. Over the course of this investigation, the detectives uncover serious family problems—financial and interpersonal. It begins to look as if everything isn’t on the up-and-up in the book shop, either. Most dangerous of all, the deceased ran afoul of a Russian oligarch to whom he sold some stolen documents, and the man wants his £2 million back.

The Russians—not just the fabulously wealthy oligarch, but also his gangsterish henchmen—bring a sense of real menace to the proceedings. Only some clever police work by Ottey and Cross’s team reveals the extent of their rather persistent presence and how they have been staking out the Squires’ shop.

Meanwhile, George is beset by his own problems. DS Ottey is now a Detective Inspector, outranking him. He fears he’ll be assigned a new partner. Of course, everyone recognizes she’s the only person who’s been able to work with him. As a reader, I also want her to stay! She’s an interesting character and a perfect foil for George.

More significantly, George’s father, Raymond, has had a stroke and will need a long course of rehabilitation, which George assumes he should take charge of. No one, especially Raymond, believes that would be a good idea, but changing George’s mind is never easy. The relationship between George and his father—and in more recent books, his mother—is one of the many charms of this series. Like Ottey, his parents know they can’t interact with their unusual son in the usual ways, and they’re models of effective coping.

Tim Sullivan is crime writer, screenwriter, and director, and his George Cross series benefits from that background in both (“I didn’t see that coming!”) plotting and the development of a diverse, never-boring cast of characters. Highly recommended.

An Irish Classic: the International

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hotel bar, barman
(photo: shankar s, creative commons license)

“If I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime,” writes Daniel Hamilton, an 18-year-old Belfast bartender and narrator of Glenn Patterson’s novel The International: A Novel of Belfast.

The history he refers to is the meeting to launch the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), an organization formed to focus attention on discrimination against Northern Ireland’s mostly Catholic nationalist minority. We call the succeeding three decades of violence and despair The Troubles, and The International “is the best book about the Troubles ever written,” says Irish author and Booker-Prize-winner Anne Enright.

Funny thing is, there’s almost no overt violence in this book, apart from the fact it’s set in a busy bar with lots of coming and going and football on the telly and political shenanigans where money changes hands and gay men and straight women hoping to meet someone and people who should have stopped drinking hours before ordering another and weddings upstairs in the hotel, at one of which the clergyman plays an accordion. In other words, enough latent violence in reserve to keep the average semi-sober person on his toes.

The principal action of the novel takes place during on Saturday evening, January 28, 1967, the night before the big meeting, larded with Danny Hamilton’s memories of other times and barroom encounters. His minutely observed portrayal of everyday life as seen from behind the bar is heartbreaking when, with the lens of hindsight, the reader knows how soon it will all be gone, sucked into a slowly unwinding catastrophe of bombs and gunfire.

The quote at the top of this piece opens the book, and these words about a barmen who was shot dead, Peter Ward, also age 18, help close it:

I can’t tell you much else about him, except that those who knew him thought the world of him. He is, I realise, an absence in this story. I wish it were not so, but guns do that, create holes which no amount of words can fill.

I wrote about this book and a visit to Princeton by Belfast author Glenn Patterson a few years ago, and it seems apt to return to it on St. Patrick’s Day, especially given his writing’s emphasis on history and politics and his deep sense of place. He said that “when history looks back at our present, it will see that what we thought we were at and what we were at, really, were entirely different.” When we think about our current moment in America, that is a sobering thought.

Here’s Glenn Patterson’s list of his top 10 books about Belfast, compiled in 2012.

Precipice

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One of the best books I’ve read this year is Robert Harris’s new political novel, Precipice. He has a penchant for looking at historical fact through the lens of fiction, and in this instance has a fascinating trove of detail to work with. The book begins in July 1914, when 27-year-old Venetia Stanley receives one of her frequent letters from UK Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, 35 years her senior. The story isn’t a thriller in the conventional sense, but the stakes are so high, the risks so great, and the potential for serious crimes no more than a hair’s-breadth away that it earns its place in that category.

As the story begins, Asquith has been Prime Minister for six years. The country—is mere weeks from the beginning of the military catastrophe of World War I. Not only is the world “on the precipice” of disaster, Asquith himself is courting political calamity, with many, many tough calculations and decisions looming. Yet he finds time and mental energy to devote to this astonishing epistolary romance. It isn’t terribly surprising that a charismatic, handsome politician would have an affair. Goodness knows, political leaders are hardly models of marital fidelity. The surprise is the degree of his obsession.

The public first learned of this correspondence when about half the letters were published in 1982, and history buffs may be familiar with this story, but it was new to me. Thus, I was particular struck by Harris’s assurance that all the Prime Minister’s letters quoted are authentic, as are excerpts from other official documents. On his last day at Number 10, after being ousted by ambitious David Lloyd George, Asquith burned Venetia’s letters to him. Now Harris has created her half of the conversation in this book.

Asquith writes Venetia not just an occasional letter, but an astonishing 560 over a three-year period, at times as many as three a day. He writes them during deliberations of the war council, when he should be writing speeches, during cabinet meetings, and he sends her copies of telegrams and other official and secret correspondence. At critical points in the government’s deliberations leading up to and during the war, he is severely distracted.

You may start out with some sympathy for them both. He is under almost unbearable pressure, surrounded by officials whose motives are partially or wholly self-interested. He cannot confide in his wife, as Harris describes her, because she is highly opinionated and indiscreet. She wants so badly to be an insider, but her behavior assures she cannot be. When he first became Prime Minister, she referred to herself as the Prime Ministress, but he soon put a stop to that.

Harris invents a fictional Scotland Yard operative, Paul Deemer, who’s assigned to read their correspondence, which is being intercepted, and determine whether it’s being leaked to German spies. It’s filled with endearments, but also contains war plans, troop movements, and political maneuverings. Venetia knows more about what is going on at the top of British government than almost anyone else. Plus, she’s privy to the PM’s take on things, which in his hands-off, wait-and-see management style, plenty of other people would like to know.

Venetia, as Harris portrays her, justifies her closeness to Prime, as she calls him, because she serves a unique role as his confidant and safety valve. He relies on her judgment and loyalty. If that were the extent of their relationship (the full extent is unknown, but if you read between the lines of his correspondence, you may have an opinion)—it would be irregular, possibly traitorous, but understandable. Gradually, however, his preoccupation with her becomes oppressive.

As wartime events mount in their seriousness, the burden of all her special knowledge becomes almost unbearable, and she resolves to create a life of her own. She takes up a nursing course with an eye to tending wounded soldiers in France, a move the PM finds almost intolerable. She can no longer be available to him as often as he would wish and his letters take on a whining, wheedling tone, that you may find more appropriate to a fifteen-year-old boy, not a mature, successful man in his sixties. You may have to keep reminding yourself that these are his actual words.

As an experienced writer of historical fiction, Harris has a good eye for period detail and the telling anecdote that will create believable, almost overpowering drama. In a great many thrillers, you may not care all that much about the characters, but in Precipice, you do and you must. It’s a terrific book.

Order from Amazon here.

Last Night at Villa Lucia by Simon McCleave

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What could be more appealing than a murder mystery set in an elegant villa high on a hill overlooking the Tuscan countryside? Prolific crime novelist Simon McCleave’s Last Night at Villa Lucia feels like a vacation from the first page.

A few flies in the ointment—or in this case, vodka—soon appear. The middle-aged woman who owns Villa Lucia has a significant drinking problem, once controlled with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, but now seriously relapsed. This, and the death that follows, is all foreshadowed in an unnecessary prologue, lifted from a place well into the story. Chapter One rewinds to two days earlier with the arrival of a new set of guests—the overbearing, deeply entitled Harry Collard, his mousy wife Zoe, and their handsome nineteen-year-old son, Charlie.

When the family arrives at the villa, they find their hostess, Cerys, who’s divorced, and her luscious daughter Lowri, about Charlie’s age. One plot point boldly forecasts itself from the moment Harry meets Lowri.

So. At least until the police arrive, you have two couples (one dad absent, but very “present” in the minds of his ex-wife and daughter). Two young adults. And, rounding out the cast, the two people who keep the place humming—Lucia De Nardi, the maid, who grew up in the villa before her uncle lost possession of it, a sore point for sure, and her husband, Lorenzo, who has a sketchy past and takes care of the pool and the gardens.

You see some of the English husbands’ arrogant behavior, in real time, in flashback, and in what the women say about them. This story might fail the Bechdel test—which checks whether a book or movie “features at least two female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man.” (Thanks, Wikipedia.) Granted, Cerys and Zoe do occasionally talk about fashion or food.

You know from the prologue that someone ends up in the infinity pool, and they aren’t swimming. That death occurs, about two days into the Collards’ stay, and by then you probably have a favored candidate for drowning and a universe of potential motives.

McCleave effectively conveys the enervating heat, the villa’s isolation, and the effects of too much alcohol, so that the arrival of the sober Policia di Stato Detective Franco Saachi is a relief. Naturally, the villa occupants don’t tell him everything. At least not right off. In a postscript, McCleave tells readers that his intentions for this book were to explore toxic masculinity, alcoholism, and abusive relationships. He achieved this goal, with a few caveats. Making both husbands so very toxic doesn’t give the narrative much nuance. It was good to see Cerys and Zoe open up to each other, and good for them, too. Cerys’s preoccupation with alcohol became a bit redundant, but it was probably an accurate way to portray this particular addiction. McCleave does give his characters some grace at the book’s end, as a reward—to you and them—for suffering through their travails. Meanwhile, you can enjoy the spectacular setting.

Correction Line

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Craig Terlson’s crime thriller, Correction Line, underscores how badly off track people can become if they just keep doing what they’re doing. Surveyors learned this in a late-1800s project to survey the vast prairies of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba and divide them into equal sections. They soon realized the longitudinal (north-south) meridians they established would converge as they reached higher latitudes, so that truly square sections would be impossible to achieve. They needed correction lines.

Just as the survey’s meridian lines met at a single point, the characters in Terlson’s story converge on a destructive human nexus named Dave. Like a black hole, he draws people and their energy to him. Being involved with Dave is extremely risky business. His career has gone from bringing in liquor, to marijuana, to hard drugs, to human trafficking. Dave doesn’t appear all that much in the story, yet he is everywhere in it. He’s the motivating force behind almost everything Terlson’s fascinating cast of characters does.

Terlson uses the wide open prairie of western Canada to great effect, as the characters range over its empty spaces in their pickup trucks and old Dodges and Pontiacs. Much of the novel is set several decades ago, and the gas-guzzlers cruise the surveyors’ grid and take the gentle curves—the correction lines—that adjust the strict geometry. He describes the stunning sunrises, the farm fields and grasslands that stretch to the horizon, and the lonely dwellings. When it seems you can see forever, the sky becomes more present. Terlson’s descriptions are more than painting pretty pictures. You need this solid grounding in the familiar, because what the characters are up to will stretch your perspective.

A young woman named Lucy has a past relationship with Dave, but she’s disappeared. Now he has cancer, and he wants her back. Alive. Lucy’s late mother made a strange potion he thinks will cure him, and Lucy makes something similar, but does it work? Dave puts his best man, Lawrence, on the job, and Lawrence recruits the rootless Curtis to help him search.

Whether she can replicate her mother’s strange mixture or not, her real talent is precognition. Maybe she doesn’t know exactly what bad thing is going to happen, but she knows something bad is heading her way. And it isn’t Roy, the failing door-to-door encyclopedia salesman who’s taken up with her.

Roy is a good guy in way over his head, with the opportunity to do something worthwhile for a change. He also has a sixth sense when trouble is brewing. Of course, this realization isn’t much of a stretch, when violent armed men are lurking about. Houses get destroyed. Cars, even big ones, don’t have a chance. Hospitals are visited. Much of the drama plays out along the roads surrounded by those endless fields, and, as you gradually get to know these dodgy characters, you come to like most of them too. You may yearn for their travels to make the slight angle of correction that would bend their lives in new directions—somewhere Dave is not.

Order from Amazon here.

The Missing Family

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The Missing Family is the latest in Tim Weaver’s popular series of thrillers featuring missing-persons investigator David Raker. Here, Weaver presents an impossible crime, the unexpected tentacles of which stretch clear from England across the Atlantic to the North American continent.

Sarah Fowler hires Raker to solve the mysterious disappearance of her family a year earlier. After a day at a favorite Dartmoor lake, her husband, teenage son, and his girlfriend row the family’s twenty-foot dinghy out onto the water one last time. Drowsy from the sun, Sarah briefly falls asleep—her wristwatch confirms she napped for no more than a minute or two—until her toddler, Mable, awakens her. Halfway across the lake, the dinghy bobs, empty. The police are baffled. The boat’s too far out for the trio to have swum to shore in the available time, not to mention the girlfriend’s arm was in a cast. They find no evidence of violence and have no witnesses.

You don’t stay with the grieving Sarah long, though. In Los Angeles, detectives from two different departments—eventually three jurisdictions—are baffled by a trio of shootings. Five bodies, killed by bullets typically used in hunting rifles, are found in remote areas. Far apart, there’s nothing to link them, and they continue for years as separate cold cases.

In yet a third plotline, at a massive London-area casino resort, the Skyline, a high-rolling gambler and casino investor is viciously stabbed to death. He and the two brothers who own the casino have been best friends for years. Despite the owners’ determination to find the murderer, security camera footage of the victim in the frequent company of another man is notably—possibly suspiciously—uninformative. Who was this stranger?

The brothers also own the world’s largest casino, The Afrique, in Las Vegas. (Coincidentally, I was at a conference in Las Vegas while reading this book, which was almost too much verisimilitude!) Weaver certainly captures the over-the-top, mildly uneasy, anything-can-happen casino buzz.

The suspected murderer returns to the Skyline, is identified (facial recognition software at work), detained, and put in one of the casino’s secure holding cells under guard. When the police arrive to arrest him, the locked cell is empty. It’s another missing person case, which cries out for Raker’s assistance. Raker’s investigations—the missing family and the casino murder and disappearance—work in tandem, while you learn about the West Coast murders through the eyes of the California detectives. A lot is going on. You may suspect that all three plot lines will eventually weave together, but how?

Though the plot is complex, Weaver’s chapters are short and keep things moving. Sometimes he tries a little too hard to end each chapter with a startling revelation, just before the next chapter switches to another plot. That said, you’ll encounter quite a few nifty surprises.

The book is written in both first-person (the Raker chapters) and third-person (all the others), which effectively provides immediacy from the lead detective, plus the differing points of view and voices of other characters. It’s never confusing. Overall, an entertaining puzzle.

Order here from Amazon.