About
Reviews
Search
Submit
Home

Mystery Books for Sale

[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]


  

TRIGGER CITY
by Sean Chercover
William Morrow, October 2008
295 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0061128694


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

When Chercover's first book, BIG CITY, BAD BLOOD, was published, it was greeted as a fresh take on the venerable PI tradition. In fact, apart from its contemporary setting, it was straight out of the classic PI tradition: a smart-talking, tough-guy PI who earns his living going down mean streets to take on the mighty and the corrupt. What made it fresh was that there was no whiff of nostalgia involved - just straightforward storytelling that puts those Chandleresque values into play on a modern stage.

In TRIGGER CITY, Ray Dudgeon takes on a different kind of organized crime, one that operates under the color of law. He's hired by a retired military man to find out the details of his daughter's death after a deranged employee walks into her home, shoots her, then commits suicide. As Dudgeon looks into it, the facts of the murder seem incontestable, but they don't add up to the truth. For that, he has to dig deeper. The dead woman and her killer both worked for a security company that holds government contracts in hot spots all over the world. Dudgeon knows something is wrong with this picture when the head of the company agrees to meet him to discuss the death of a former accountant. Her job wasn't that important – unless something's being covered up. Before long, Dudgeon is entangled in a dangerous dance between ruthless employees of the security company, a secretive government agency with obscure motives, and his own emotional need to find out what led to the woman's murder.

None of this improves his rocky relationship with the woman he loves, but who wants no part of the violence that surrounds him. They have been estranged since the events of the previous book in the series, but Dudgeon can't let it go. In fact, he has one of his employees shadow her and the doctor she's currently dating, even though he knows it's creepy. He also takes to sleeping in the dead woman's apartment, listening to her music and reading through her diary, her unhappiness seeping into his own to the point that his allegiance is to her, not to the man who hired him.

Though Chercover's plots are drawn to a large scale, his lead character is not a stock action hero. He is complex, often confused, and full of fully human contradictory impulses. He is more self-aware than Chandler's archetypal hero, and we get to more about his personal life than we do about Sam Spade's or Philip Marlowe's – but at his root he is, like them, a man of honor, searching for a hidden truth.

Though the story is, in many ways, an old-fashioned adventure tale, it has a somber and timely political subtext. Ray Dudgeon's not afraid to takes sides. He's been tortured himself; he's not in favor of it. The story reflects on the current state of affairs, with money-fueled entanglements between government agencies and private contractors, and with "national security" offering a convenient shroud of secrecy for any covert action that might be embarrassing or illegal. Chercover uses the framework of a traditional PI story to depict a reality that, in Chandler's words, "is not a very fragrant world. But it is the world you live in."

Reviewed by Barbara Fister, October 2008

[ Top ]


QUICK SEARCH:

 

Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit ]
[ Home ]