The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 5 October 2015
by John Lescroart
It's San Francisco in the late 1980s (the book was published in 1989), and a young man's body has been found in a parking lot along one of the industrial waterfront channels (which are today becoming hot tech and condo developments). Eddie Cochran seems, on the surface of things, to have committed suicide, but, we know from the genre, that that can't be the whole story. In walks Dismas Hardy, former cop, former lawyer, Vietnam veteran, ex-husband, one-time father, current afternoon bartender at the Shamrock, along Lincoln Way in San Francisco. Knowing the family of the victim, and given his investigative history, Hardy is asked to look into Eddie's death, especially as the police are not particularly interested in the vague notions that it was murder rather than suicide. Hardy's interest is in getting Eddie's widow the insurance payout that would come with a ruling of murder. What ensues is a complex web of stories, family connections, business histories and some illegal machinations. Eddie's suicide becomes the core element in a cluster of deaths, from a man falling from the second deck during a Giants game at Candlestick Park, to a drunken death by hot tub. They're all connected to a greater or lesser degree. Hardy's search for the truth, skirting the police department (never mind a little obstruction of justice and impersonating an officer of the law) and the local Catholic church (taking confession from a priest), takes us down plausibly convoluted paths. The many characters are distinct and have convincing motives or complex histories. The city is not so much of a character itself as a well-worn landscape in the background, though there are a number of familiar locations. The story moves forward in short fitful chapters. The writing is spare and somewhat uneven, with some odd internal contradictions early-on, but the plot and Hardy's life move forward with complex ease. Lescroart delivers up the solution, however, in a particularly clunky denoument out of an old Agatha Christie story. Still, this is the first in a series of Dismas Hardy novels that number fifteen as of last year. Hardy has lots of time to develop as a character, and Lescroart, with his already sharp skills, even more so as a writer.