Following
his well-received debut Jackson Donne PI novel, 'When One Man Dies',
White crafts another satisfyingly nasty noir tale that affirms, once
again, that the sins of the past often spill into the present and when
that happens, it's rarely a good thing.
Donne, White's series character,
stripped of his PI license and grieving the death of his wife Jeanne,
who was killed by a drunk driver, finds his only solace downing beers
at the Olde Towne Tavern. He is contacted by his sister Susan, whom
he hasn't seen in years, with concerns about his dying mother and the
disturbing stories she is telling about crimes some 60 years past. Susan
wants Donne to investigate and unearth the truth; Donne wants nothing
of it. Susan's husband, Franklin, offers payment; Donne takes it and
thus embarks on a complex, dangerous and deadly exploration into the
family's past.
The narrative unfolds in two parallel stories, one set
in the present and the other, the Joe Tenant story, set some 60 years
in the past. While readers know these stories will ultimately intersect,
White invests each with twists, turns and disturbing shifts so that
the path to conclusion is both surprising and suspenseful. Neither story
is black and white. In each, some otherwise good guys are driven to
do bad-guy things, some good guys die, and some bad guys don't. At its
heart, this is a novel about family and about having "to fix what
the people before you did wrong".
White's prose is clean and stripped
down as befits this classic noir novel. His pacing is brisk and he's
mastered the art of morphing dread into suspense and ultimately into
fear to keep the reader turning pages hungrily. While much of the plotting
is not new to noir readers, White whips up the energy level and tosses
in an unexpected twist or two to keep things fresh. What might otherwise
be yet another dark tale of cross, double cross and triple cross surprises
and succeeds in White's sure hand.
Donne is becoming an increasingly
engaging series character, a flawed but basically good guy who finds
himself – well, maybe puts himself – into heaps of trouble,
often violent, and occasionally deadly. At novel's end, Donne has abandoned
the beer, re-engaged with his family, and plans to go off to college
to make something of his life. Readers can only hope that college doesn't
get in the way of Jackson Donne PI taking on more investigations, licensed
or not.