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Deacon Kane used to be a best-selling author. Then his son drowned while scuba diving, Deke's marriage fell apart, he started to drink and couldn't write a word. Fallen on hard times, Deke takes a teaching position at his alma mater, Southampton College in the Hamptons on Long Island. He goes through the motions in teaching his classes and feels like an impostor teaching creative writing when he cannot write a single line himself. Deke is also having an affair with a married woman, although it would be more correct to say he has become obsessed with her. Deke is such a mess it is hard to feel any sympathy for him. In the bitter cold of an early winter freeze a body is found floating in one of the bays. The body is that of a young man, a student of Deke's. The police think it is suicide but there are many, including the boy's family, who refuse to believe it. A young man named Tommy Miller, son of a corrupt former police chief, listens to the police scanner and haunts crime scenes. He wants to work for a local private eye and he believes that if he gets all the details on local crimes that he possibly can, the PI and Clay, his investigator, will hire him. Deke has come to the notice of the police as a 'person of interest' in the death of the young men (there were also two prior unsolved deaths where they were found floating in one of the bays). He can't account for all his time because he was either with his lover or in one case, passed out cold. The characters show up at random on the page and only after reading further in the book does it become clear to the reader how they are (or will soon be) involved in the action. No one is apparently who or what they seem, in fact, most of them seem to be either slightly 'off' or their motivation doesn't make sense. Most of it comes together -- more or less -- at the conclusion. The weather is as dark, cold and bleak as the book. That's not to suggest the book is not interesting, but most of the characters are unlikable, and it's not to take anything away from the writer who is a Shamus Award winner.
Reviewed by Lorraine Gelly, July 2006
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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