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Robert Mallon is living a quiet life in Santa Barbara, California; he’s retired young with more money than anyone would expect just by looking at him. He spends his days walking the beaches and reading. One day he watches a young woman walk into the surf and just keep on going. He pulls her from the water, saving her life, which is not what she was looking for. They spend some time together, but she is gone when he comes back from getting some dinner for them. When the local police find a woman shot in a field, Mallon knows it is the same woman. And he’s right. Mallon wants to know more about Catherine Broward, the dead woman. He is convinced that there was some connection between them, and there is also some residual guilt stemming from his sister’s suicide many years ago. Mallon hires Lydia Marks to help him investigate Broward’s life. He and Lydia used to work together years ago, as parole officers. She’s now a private investigator. Somewhere in the course of their investigation, they stumble across some information that complicates their lives in ways they can’t begin to imagine. Mallon is an honest man, and expects the people he meets to be the same. This is a fallacious assumption, as any reader of fiction knows. As his life begins to disintegrate around him, Mallon learns to question just about everyone and everything he encounters. This is a good thing. Thomas Perry is a master of suspense. While some of the characters in DEAD AIM could use some fleshing out, the slow and steady tilting of Mallon’s world keeps the reader from paying much attention to those kinds of details. The basic premise upon which the plot depends is possible, but not probable, and growing more likely as time goes on. While this book doesn’t have the kind of strong female character embodied by Native American Jane Whitefield in Perry's other series, readers who relish the suspense and action of those novels will be quite happy with DEAD AIM.
Reviewed by P.J. Coldren, August 2006
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