My favorite genre is not mystery or noir or thriller or Southern Gothic ... or any of the things that it probably should seem to be, based on my own writings and any list of favorite novels I would ever make. My favorite genre is too specific to even be a genre. I like smart, gritty mystery novels with a poetic sense of purpose. Yeah, it's rare. But with Timothy Hallinan's Poke Rafferty series, I have found it yet again. The latest in the series, For the Dead, was released earlier this month from Soho Crime. While I strongly recommend going back to the beginning (A Nail Through the Heart), Hallinan does a masterful job of driving the plot without the need for backstory. And, even more impressive, he manages to draw an uninitiated reader into the characters and develop those characters within the confines of this one book. So the story works both narratively and thematically. Poke Rafferty has a long line of the dead in his life, but we need not know the names to understand his choice not to live for them. The action of For the Dead takes place in Bangkok, when American travel writer Poke Rafferty has been living there for seven years. He has settled into a normal life (normal for Poke, anyway) with his ex-stripper wife, Rose, and their adopted-from-the-streets daughter, Miaow. But, when Miaow turns to her old street-wise ways to secure a stolen iPhone for her boyfriend, normal becomes a few fleeting chapters lost somewhere in the beginning of an avalanche of a book. Miaow's stolen phone contains the photos of a couple of dead cops. And the mystery of their murders contains a conspiracy reaching deep into Bangkok's past. Although the "big bad" and the ending fell ever-so-slightly contrived (by Hallinan standards), the feeling of closure and redemption will make the reader quickly forget any feelings of disappointment. And the novel reads so beautifully, plot is always a distant second anyway. Although the easy comparison to make with Poke Rafferty novels is John Burdett, I see another, more apt comparison for Timothy Hallinan's writing. Reed Farrel Coleman has been called the "hard-boiled poet" for his striking narratives of crime and loss and suspense. Hallinan is right there with him. There is poetry on every page. There is thought in the choice of each word, whether it is the description of a river in a dream or the description of a brutal murder. Hallinan is operating on a level with few other crime writers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |