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A Kaminsky mystery worthy of its predecessors
The author's complex tale conjures up the genre's greats.
By William McKeen, Special to the Times
Published October 14, 2007
The Dead Don't Lie
By Stuart M. Kaminsky
Forge Press, 304 pages, $23.95
Festival of Reading
Kaminsky will appear on a panel, "Crime and Character," at 3 p.m. Oct. 27.
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Network television is going down the tubes. The radio spews moronic and joyless grinding. Movies are pitched at squirming adolescents. But mystery novels remain great mass entertainment. In fact, the genre is in a golden age, much like the one that gave us the great tautly told stories of the 1930s. Novels by Michael Connelly and Tom Corcoran are great and complex character studies that are also terrific whodunits. If you haven't read a Stuart Kaminsky novel (hard to miss; he has published 55), then add him to the list of writers who craft superb mysteries. His sleuth in The Dead Don't Lie is a world-weary Chicago cop named Abe Lieberman, who speaks in riddles and Henny Youngman-worthy one-liners, and offers the wisdom of Solomon to anyone who will listen. The mystery in the book dates from Turkey a century ago, but circumstances drop it into Lieberman's lap in present-day Chicago. He and his partner, Bill Hanrahan, fight crime and juggle odd and fulminating private lives. The wives and children aren't mere supporting players. These detectives face enough drama at home to fill your standard angst-laden novel by a newly minted creative-writing MFA. Lieberman is a grandfather, but his daughter, incapable of raising her children, has left Abe and Bess to do the work. Into their complicated private lives, murders intervene. An old journal is the catalyst for a series of events featuring a husband-and-wife ultimate-fighting team, an aromatic man known as the Camel, and an unfortunate Swede who gets shot in the testicles. In the end, the mysteries are solved, but the book is much more than a crisply told thriller. It's a brilliant character study of two intensely flawed, utterly unforgettable detectives. William McKeen is chairman of the journalism department at the University of Florida.
[Last modified October 10, 2007, 18:06:26]
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