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FATAL DEAD LINES
by John Luciew
Pocket Books, November 2003
326 pages
$6.99
ISBN: 0743471415


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

After delighting in the books of Christopher Brookmyre and John Burns, I recently wondered why we Americans aren't putting out great crime fiction featuring investigative reporters the way the Brits are. True, the mother country is short on private eye stories, but still.

New author John Luciew is turning things around. His charmingly gruff obituary writer, Lenny Holcomb, was once the lead reporter on the Three Mile Island story, but the bottle and the newspaper's bottom-line management have led him to the bottom of the news hierarchy, fixing up the funeral directors' faxes for the Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Herald obituary pages. So Lenny's the one assigned to collect testimonials and write the obit when the governor's gluttonous chief fund-raiser drops dead at a banquet. The newsroom notices Lenny's alive when Lenny unravels a little chicanery by noticing that the dead man's bar tab around town approximately equals his official salary.

When the governor's press secretary is fired for allowing the scandal to surface and drowns in the Susquehanna River as an apparent suicide, Lenny senses things aren't right and, setting aside Jack and Jim (Daniels and Beam, respectively) for the moment, he once again becomes a journalist. World-weary cynicism with a stenographer's notebook confronts hustling young careerist cynicism with a micro tape recorder, Three Mile Island makes it back on CNN, the White House ambitions of the governor and his hangers-on wax and wane, and Lenny proves himself as a top-flight journalist after decades on the obit desk.

This debut crime novel has three-dimensional characters-no superheroes or demons. The plot works, the humor sprinkled here and there works, and the details of the setting are accurate. Yes, the coroner's facilities really are dingy, unsanitary, and in the basement of the county home for the aged. Yes, lots of people overturn boats, jump off bridges, or drive into the river and drown. Yes, downtown is packed with trendy, noisy bars that cater to the lobbyists and the lobbied. I know because I live here, and Luciew's gotten it right. He's also got lots more material for sequels. This morning's newspaper, for example, noted that the mayor has amassed a huge collection of Wyatt Earp memorabilia for a Wild West museum he's planning for Harrisburg. I can hardly wait to see Lenny's take on that.

Reviewed by Joy Matkowski, July 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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