The Mean Streets

Saturday, September 22, 2007

 

*Night Work (Full Review)

by Steve Hamilton

Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s                             

$23.95                        

 

Steve Hamilton is the award-winning author of the Alex McKnight series. His latest novel, Night Work, is a polished and entertaining stand-alone thriller. Although even the most credulous of readers may find that parts of this story border on the improbable, Hamilton’s star continues to rise and this book really does shine in all of the right places.

 

Joe Trumbull is a juvenile probation officer working in Kingston, New York. When he’s not busting his tail trying to keep his adolescent “knuckleheads” out of jail he’s sparring with guys five times tougher and more skilled than he is at Anderson’s Gym, a converted bus station where he also resides on the second floor. Joe doesn’t mind the work, or the pain involved in working out as he does. Two years ago his fiancé was strangled to death a couple of nights before their wedding. The perpetrator was never caught. Pounding the mean streets of Kingston by day and the heavy bag by night are, frankly, the only things keeping Joe sane.

 

Against his better judgment Joe arranges to go out on a blind date. It’s his first attempt at any such thing since the death of hisintended. After some initial awkwardness and not a little fear, he and a woman named Marlene Frost actually have a pretty good time together. In a “morning after” nightmare of epic proportions, however, Marlene is found murdered. Unbelieveably, more young women are found dead in the days and weeks that follow. The only thing the victims have in common – apart from the violent manner of their demise – is that they have all recently been in contact with Joe Trumbull. The police are not sure what to make of it all. One thing they do know, however, is that (either as prime suspect or just a guy with some bad karma that keeps rubbing off) Joe Trumbull is the key to the whole thing. For Trumbull, well, he begins to learn that William Faulkner may have been right after all and that “The past isn’t dead. In fact, it isn’t even past.”

 

Steve Hamilton is a very good writer, period. His prose is lush and emotion-laden and, at the same time, hard-edged enough to satisfy fans of even the truly noir. Joe Trumbull is an intriguing and engaging character. Tough guys with big hearts are a dime-a-dozen, to be sure, but somehow the author pulls it off here without turning Trumbull into a cliché. Part of me can’t help hoping that he will return in subsequent novels; another part hopes that his character won’t be diluted or exploited by appearing again and again in some kind of series. As if all of that were not enough, the streets of Kingston and the back roads of the Hudson Valley come alive in the pages of Night Work. Hamilton’s use of his setting is detailed and evocative. His rather idyllic descriptions of the tree-lined avenues, quaint old businesses and rolling hills in the region are tempered by his depictions of urban blight and suburban families gone horribly wrong. It’s not easy to combine nostalgia with harsh realism but the author does so brilliantly.

 

Where the novel falters somewhat is in terms of the plot. The story line is, in places, downright predictable. Where it’s not predictable it’s implausible in the extreme. A solid premise gives way eventually to the bizarre and unbelievable. It’s not really that the author looses control. It’s rather that the dénouement partakes too freely of what are basically elements from the B-movie or even horror genres. Hamilton’s ability to walk the tightrope and keep seemingly contradictory or incompatible elements in creative/artistic tension – a knack which is displayed so prominently earlier in the book – seems to elude him to some degree toward its conclusion. In the process, a number of rather significant questions are left unanswered and a few plot threads are left conspicuously dangling.

 

Nevertheless, and when you get right down to it, Night Work is most definitely a “keeper.” In truth, the scenery and the action on the side of the road as you go whizzing by (page-by-page) will be so interesting and so compelling you probably won’t even notice the few bumps and potholes encountered along the way.

 

*Full Review published first in Mystery News (August/September 2007)

 

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