Like a fast-paced, atmospheric, well written detective story? Bob Moyer has found a series that’s all that while adapted to our modern age.
Reviewed by Robert P. Moyer
BLIND TO MIDNIGHT. By Reed Farrell Coleman. Black Stone Publishing. 291 pages. $26.99
Back in the good old days, a hard-boiled detective wore a fedora, drank cheap whiskey from a bottle in the bottom drawer of his desk, slept in his office, had bad luck with women and worked alone.
Reed Farrell Coleman has updated the role with Detective Nick Ryan.
Nick frequently wears a motorcycle helmet (he rides a Norton), drinks the best whiskey, lives in a Manhattan apartment with a view, has a regular hookup and a loving ex-wife as well as a sidekick, a backup man and an Internet genius on his team.
Nick is on the NYPD police force, but he works for a shadowy agency as a “fixer.” In this second in the series, his “handler” tasks him with finding who committed the only actual murder on 9/11. It looked like an act of retribution on a Muslim, but Nick is told otherwise. On his path to finding out whodunnit, Nick encounters the kidnappers of a billionaire, the billionaire’s wife and the inexplicable death of a family friend and his wife. All of this winds around and comes back together, with car chases, muggings, gunfights, and the ultimate truth behind the murder — money. It’s a fast-paced, page-turning read.
But that’s not all you get. Like any good hard-boiled novel, this is about the dialogue and atmosphere as well as the danger and the dames, and Coleman is one of the best at that game. “It was night outside when Nick emerged. It seemed darker than it should be,” he notes in a somber moment. Later, after the battle that left a “…tiny island covered in the casualty of a war ended two decades past,” Nick describes how “…darkness had taken the day by the throat and squeezed the light and warmth out of it.” A woman he has dinner with “…smelled like a walk in a dangerous garden.” And Nick’s Yankees “…could never do something new. They were victims of their own legacy, forever tethered to the past. Nick understood there was a lesson in that for him. He just wasn’t sure yet what it was.”
Coleman has managed to keep up with the times, and keep up a time-honored tradition as well. Nick will certainly show up again soon on the mean streets of Manhattan.