Past Due

Rating:
Summary: fine private investigator tale
Review: In Philadelphia, lawyer Victor Carl visits his dying father residing at the Temple University Hospital. His dad may be near death and seems to only tell melancholy tales from his youth, but has enough of his faculties to know that his son's cable is out and the Sixers are on TV.

Meanwhile pathetic insignificant wannabe thug Joey "Cheaps" Parma wants to retain Victor involving the murder of a lawyer Tommy Greeley twenty years ago. Only Victor would agree to assist Joey Cheaps, who not only never pays on time, is assumed guilty even by his attorney, and admits to his lawyer that he was one of the killers. However, not long afterward, the throat slashed corpse of Joey Cheaps is found near the waterfront. Though he knows he will not get paid and realizes he should mind his business, Victor feels a certain obligation to his dead client and begins making inquiries into what happened two decades ago and why suddenly did that homicide resurface into a new murder.

Though the conspiratorial ending and the lack of legalese makes the tale more a private investigator novel, fans will enjoy touring Philadelphia on Victor Carl's days off. The story line is fast-paced, punctuated by Victor's sarcasm, much of which is self-effacing. His relationship with his dad adds a humanizing sidebar even if the Iverson is the draw. Readers will enjoy trekking the town with Victor as he does what he believes is right even for a dead beat loser like Cheaps.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: This may very well be the novel of the year!
Review: It doesn't take long with PAST DUE --- no it doesn't take long at all, just the first few sentences --- to realize that you're getting into something that transcends the normal reading experience. It's that opening paragraph, where author William Lashner begins comparing a crime scene to a nativity display that tips you off that this will be one of those rare experiences where the boundaries between reader and writer are going to be removed and cut down, and there will be --- dare I say it? --- an intimacy achieved that will be close to making love.

The image that kept recurring to me as I read PAST DUE is that of Lashner as one of those gourmet chefs who comes to your table and prepares this one-of-a-kind meal where everything is perfect. The vegetables are fresh, you can still see the morning dew on them; the meat drips red and is nicely marbled; the sauces and creams shimmer deeply; and the chef knows exactly what he is doing with his razor-sharp cutlery, not so much slicing and dicing as sculpting and carving, his preparation and presentation being as much a part of the meal as the ultimate consumption. Each course is presented in due time, with prescient knowledge of how long it takes to consume, enjoy and digest each presentation. And when the meal is completed, you're not stuffed or bloated, but it was so good that you feel as if you will never need or want to eat again. That was what reading PAST DUE is like.

PAST DUE is the fourth Victor Carl novel. Carl, is a lawyer in Philadelphia as opposed to the archetypal "Philadelphia lawyer." Lashner's presentation of Carl has grown progressively darker with each successive novel; in PAST DUE, he takes a tiny step back from the abyss toward which Carl had seemed to be inexorably headed.

The tale begins with the murder of one of Carl's clients, a multiple-time loser named Joseph Parma, better known as Joey Cheaps. Cheaps had earned his nickname as the result of owing everyone, including Carl, money. As Carl informs us, however, in one of the many brilliant soliloquies that are so bountifully sprinkled throughout this work, Cheaps was his client and thus entitled to his loyalty. Carl accordingly feels duty bound to begin shaking bushes and turning over rocks, doing whatever it takes to discover who murdered Cheaps.

And Carl has a lead, though it's tenuous. Shortly before Cheaps was murdered, he had told Carl a story about a holdup that had gone wrong some 20 years previously and that had resulted in an apparent murder and the loss of a suitcase stuffed with money, a remote event that was coming back to haunt Cheaps and that ultimately snuffed him out entirely. Carl picks up the thread, grudgingly aided by Philadelphia Homicide Detective McDeiss, who is not above trading information for an exquisite meal at a white linen restaurant. The trail leads back to a haunted Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice, a hedonistic drug dealer, and an enigmatic woman who was the subject, decades before, of a series of erotic photographs, all of whom are tied together in a tableau of passion, guilt and revenge that will have untoward consequences for them all.

Carl has other concerns as well. His father is gravely ill and, while awaiting surgery from which he may not recover, begins to tell Carl a story about a woman from his past, a tale that at first repulses, then fascinates, and ultimately becomes an obsession. Perhaps Lashner will at some future point revisit this father's tale, perhaps not. Certainly it creates a tantalizing starting point for a new novel. And yet PAST DUE is so complete, such a work of art, that one could easily understand if Lashner chose not to return to Carl's universe, at least for a while. What more could he say that is not said between the covers of PAST DUE?

It is of course at this juncture too early to say, but PAST DUE may well be the novel of the year. My sense is that, with this work, Lashner completes the task that Raymond Chandler left undone. If you read nothing else this year, you must read PAST DUE.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps his best?
Review: Past Due was a lot of fun to read...the plot contained the important twists and turns, but did not feel as desperate as some of the other stories--indeed, Victor was more in control. It was fun to see McDeiss, Larry, Skink again. Where was Morris? I love Morris. I miss Morris. Anyway, the real strength of this story was the way Victor continued to come to terms with himself. And his past. Lashner is to praised for allowing Victor to mature and grow. A very special thing.

Rating:
Summary: A good, not great legal drama.
Review: Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl is used to doing the wrong things for the right reasons even if comes to dealing with a guilty client. Victor defended Joey `Cheaps' Parma and got him off the hook, but wannabe hoodlum Parma has one more secret to spring upon his lawyer...Joey calls Victor and asks him about the statue of limitations on murder, only to find out there are none. Joey proceeds to tell his story of killing a young lawyer twenty years earlier.

Hours later, Victor is called to a crime scene in which the victim has his throat slit...the victim is Joey Parma.

Victor agrees to help Joey's mom catch the killer of her son, but in the process finds himself involved in a twisted investigation that has mob men, a missing suitcase filled with money, pictures of a naked woman, a Judge and a vengeful victim back from the dead.

`Past Due' is a well-written, but overly-long thriller that looses steam about half-way through. The complex plot will have some readers turning the pages, but others will find the twists confusing and the chapters involving Victor's father down-right boring.

William Lashner is a talented writer and his Victor Carl series is one of the better legal thrillers on the market, unfortunately his new one abandons most of the legal thrills for that of a procedural drama and it doesn't work.

Nick Gonnella

Rating:
Summary: A good, not great legal drama.
Review: Philadelphia lawyer Victor Carl is used to doing the wrong things for the right reasons even if comes to dealing with a guilty client. Victor defended Joey 'Cheaps' Parma and got him off the hook, but wannabe hoodlum Parma has one more secret to spring upon his lawyer...Joey calls Victor and asks him about the statue of limitations on murder, only to find out there are none. Joey proceeds to tell his story of killing a young lawyer twenty years earlier.

Hours later, Victor is called to a crime scene in which the victim has his throat slit...the victim is Joey Parma.

Victor agrees to help Joey's mom catch the killer of her son, but in the process finds himself involved in a twisted investigation that has mob men, a missing suitcase filled with money, pictures of a naked woman, a Judge and a vengeful victim back from the dead.

'Past Due' is a well-written, but overly-long thriller that looses steam about half-way through. The complex plot will have some readers turning the pages, but others will find the twists confusing and the chapters involving Victor's father down-right boring.

William Lashner is a talented writer and his Victor Carl series is one of the better legal thrillers on the market, unfortunately his new one abandons most of the legal thrills for that of a procedural drama and it doesn't work.

Nick Gonnella

Rating:
Summary: Yo - You's Gots to Read 'dia Book!
Review: South Philly. Not the more popular - and more tired - cities of New York, LA, or New Orleans, but South Philly - the setting William Lashner chooses for "Past Due". It is a good choice - a city Lashner clearly knows well, and of which he writes with passion and forcefulness on a par with Dennis Lehane's Boston. A portrait of Lashner's Philadelphia is reflected in the author's photo on the dust jacket: the battered countenance of an ex-boxer, the smug confidence, the ugly red tie reminiscent of that worn by Lashner's lawyer-hero Victor Carl.

Victor Carl, like Lashner, is Philadelphia personified. A blue-collar lawyer, proud but far from rich, street smart but never sophisticated. In "Past Due", it is only Carl's loyalty and honor compels him to track down the killer of Joey "Cheaps" Parma, a marginal mobster and sometimes Carl-client who leaves this life with lots of debts and zero assets. Carl's investigation takes him back to the 20-year disappearance of Tommy Greeley, uncovering a sordid tale of the usual drugs, thugs, murder, and mayhem, with a Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice thrown in for good measure. But while the plot may be pedestrian by some standards, the story pummels along from chapter to chapter like a heavy weight bouncing off the ropes, buoyed by the strength of colorful characters playing their parts in seedy bars and tacky mansions from the Schuylkill River to the Black Horse Pike. The dialogue is realistic, ethnic, sometimes funny, always quick. "Past Due" is simply unadorned hard-hitting crime fiction, more Jim Thompson than John Grisham, all grit and little finesse. Is this a novel you'll remember three months from now? Probably not, but it sure is a lot of fun along the way. Kind of like South Philly.

Rating:
Summary: Yo - You's Gots to Read 'dia Book!
Review: South Philly. Not the more popular - and more tired - cities of New York, LA, or New Orleans, but South Philly - the setting William Lashner chooses for "Past Due". It is a good choice - a city Lashner clearly knows well, and of which he writes with passion and forcefulness on a par with Dennis Lehane's Boston. A portrait of Lashner's Philadelphia is reflected in the author's photo on the dust jacket: the battered countenance of an ex-boxer, the smug confidence, the ugly red tie reminiscent of that worn by Lashner's lawyer-hero Victor Carl.

Victor Carl, like Lashner, is Philadelphia personified. A blue-collar lawyer, proud but far from rich, street smart but never sophisticated. In "Past Due", it is only Carl's loyalty and honor compels him to track down the killer of Joey "Cheaps" Parma, a marginal mobster and sometimes Carl-client who leaves this life with lots of debts and zero assets. Carl's investigation takes him back to the 20-year disappearance of Tommy Greeley, uncovering a sordid tale of the usual drugs, thugs, murder, and mayhem, with a Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice thrown in for good measure. But while the plot may be pedestrian by some standards, the story pummels along from chapter to chapter like a heavy weight bouncing off the ropes, buoyed by the strength of colorful characters playing their parts in seedy bars and tacky mansions from the Schuylkill River to the Black Horse Pike. The dialogue is realistic, ethnic, sometimes funny, always quick. "Past Due" is simply unadorned hard-hitting crime fiction, more Jim Thompson than John Grisham, all grit and little finesse. Is this a novel you'll remember three months from now? Probably not, but it sure is a lot of fun along the way. Kind of like South Philly.

Rating:
Summary: A New Dimension for Lashner
Review: This is Lashner's most ambitious work and is clearly a departure from his first three books, all of which I read and enjoyed. South Phildelphia lawyer Victor Carl is the narrator, but this has little to do with being a Grisham type novel. This is Mystic River moves to South Philly. It all starts with Joey Cheaps getting his throat slashed. Joey leaves the world the way he lived in it, owing everyone in sight, including Carl. Hours before his death Joey had met with Victor Carl and as Carl put it, "...Joey Cheaps had given me something. It was something I didn't want, something I had no use for, but he had given it to me all the same. He had given me a murder." As Carl recounts Joey's tale of a twenty year old murder he also reveals a part of himself and his loyalty to a client. That loyalty in Victor Carl's world means "in a world where every person has turned against him there is one person who will fight by his side as long as there is a battle to be fought. And the final battle, far as I could see, was just beginning." Truer words were never put to paper.

Carl's search for Joey's killer leads down many paths and to many interesting a bizarre characters. Halfway through the book he notes, "I had gotten in the middle of something, of which I didn't have the first clue." Right again.

The story unwinds like the peeling of an onion and glimpses of the answer show for a moment and then the story turns in another direction. However, no matter what direction it takes, the reader has signed on for the duration and the answer when it comes, is well worth the trip.

On a personal note, I came by this book through the generosity of a lady who has read my reviews and found them useful. Her husband had started the book, but found it not to his liking and declined to finish it. She offered to send it to me to see what I thought of it. Well, I am delighted she did and I would be more than happy to return it so that she might read it or her husband might give it a second chance. I found it fascinating and I hope you will also.