Private investigator Wyatt Hunt, a former caseworker for San Francisco's Child Protective Service, is more used to surveillance and insurance fraud cases, but his latest job quickly outstrips those - not only does it involve the murder of a federal judge and his young girlfriend, but Hunt's new love interest, Trial TV journalist Andrea Parisi, vanishes shortly after they sleep together for the first time - she was covering the case, and Hunt doesn't know if she's in danger, purposely missing to increase her profile, or a suspect.
This précis really doesn't justice to this first in what promises to be a new series, but the risk of spoilers is high. The novel opens with "that was then": vignettes from Hunt's first career, including interactions with Juhle, which give a flavour of the character and the organisation in which he worked; not only is Hunt complex and well-developed, but his loosely organised Hunt Club, including homicide detective Devin Juhle, are nicely detailed, and the plot is complex and predominantly original. Common to all Lescroat's novels (which I must go back and re-read), The Hunt Club has action, suspense, finely tuned tension, detailed plotting, strong characters, and (for the fans) minor cross-overs from his better know Abe Glitsky/ Diz Hardy Diz novels. The varied plots, both major and minor, satisfyingly intersect, without stretching credulity or telegraphing their connections in advance, and there's a strong sense of the city as a character in the novel, which I think is well done.
A particularly interesting element is the possible involvement of the California Ccorrections Peace Officers Association, and the effect of the union on shaping legislation (an aspect I had given no thought to at all before, but which I now find troubling and intreguing) - the research Lescroat has done into potential corruption was fascinating, well presented, and smoothly integrated into the novel. In fact, the novel as a whole appears (given that the US legal system is far from my area of specialty) to be both well researched and subtly incorporated. That said, I do have a couple of areas of dissatisfaction with The Hunt Club. Most notably, I found the ending flabby, and think that the novel as a whole would have benefitted from a little judicious editing and a little less detail in some spots. And why is it that an affair between two men needs to be qualified as 'homosexual'? Surely that's obvious from the fact that they're both men... These elements aside, I very much enjoyed my first foray into Lescroat's work int he better part of a decade, prompted purely by seeing this by chance when in Rome, and look forward to checking out both his newer writing and the novels I once devoured. - Alex
No comments:
Post a Comment