I think that the best discriminator between mystery readers is how much they care about the mystery.\u00a0 I get the impression that there are folks out there who live for the most perfectly crafted puzzles.\u00a0 They love puzzles that play fair, that challenge the intellect, that stand up to careful analysis long after the book is complete.\u00a0 I am not one of those people; every mystery is a McGuffin to me.\u00a0 I like to see interesting characters,\u00a0 a sense of place, great writing – the sorts of things that make a great novel.\u00a0 The mystery format can be a great structure on which to hang those elements, and Barry Fantoni does a nice job hanging his writing here.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0 hook – and one can almost always characterize a modern mystery by its hook – is that the eponymous private eye is in his eighties.\u00a0 This fact is both central to the novel and peripheral to the proceedings.\u00a0 Structurally, it doesn’t change the process of unravelling the mystery much at all.\u00a0 Leg work is leg work, and an old man can work a .38 and a tough line as well as anyone.\u00a0 There is refreshingly little outright violence, though.<\/p>\n
Harry’s an interesting guy in how independent he is and how he sticks to being who he is.\u00a0 I don’t mean independent in the sense of “not in a nursing home.” He is who he is.\u00a0 He doesn’t seem to have close friends or family around, but he’s not the less for it.\u00a0 He’s still who he wants to be.\u00a0 It’s\u00a0 nice to see a story about an older fellow that’s light on the lamentation.<\/p>\n
I also liked Fantoni’s evocation of Florida.\u00a0 This isn’t the Florida of Hiaasen, filled with crazies and wild beauty, but the Florida seen by a still adventurous older man.\u00a0 There are no poetic passages about the Everglades, but you always know where you are.<\/p>\n
Thematically Harry’s age plays large.\u00a0 Underlying all of this are questions about the protagonist that loom large but aren’t directly answered.\u00a0 Why is he doing this job at this age? is the big one, of course, but there are others about friends and family.\u00a0 It turns out that the answer to the first answers the others, but not in a terribly direct way.\u00a0 It’s a nice piece of understatement, leaving the big questions and the big answers for the reader to find and answer.<\/p>\n
Overall, a fine little mystery with a\u00a0 compelling protagonist and some nice ideas.<\/p>\n
Recommended.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I think that the best discriminator between mystery readers is how much they care about the mystery.\u00a0 I get the impression that there are folks out there who live for the most perfectly crafted puzzles.\u00a0 They love puzzles that play fair, that challenge the intellect, that stand up to careful analysis long after the book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1821"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1823,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions\/1823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lunabase.org\/~faber\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}