Description:
Like Ross Macdonald's empathic private eye, Lew Archer, Stuart M. Kaminsky's Lew Fonesca is well acquainted with psychological hardships. Only in Fonesca's case, the problems are mostly his own, rather than his clients'. His wife's unsolved car-accident death in Chicago several years ago left him clinically depressed. "Close to suicidal a few times," he explains in Midnight Pass, "but my therapist assures me I’m not psychotic." It also led to Fonesca's escape to sunny Sarasota, Florida. Nowadays, when he isn't watching old movies or otherwise trying to hide away from the world, he takes on process-serving assignments as well as investigative work for people with daunting troubles of their own. This includes people such as the Reverend Fernando Wilkins, who in this third Fonesca outing (after Vengeance and Retribution) hires the outwardly unremarkable, "poor but honest" Italian sleuth to locate a dying county councilman, William Trasker, who's vanished just prior to a decisive vote on reopening a controversial waterway. Did Trasker hie off for a last-breath fling, leaving his former movie-star wife behind? Or was he kidnapped for political purposes--perhaps by shady landowner and baseball fanatic Kevin Hoffman, a man with a hefty financial stake in that waterway's future? Distracted by a coterie of eccentric secondary players (including a homeless gent, intent on remaking himself as a dance instructor), and under the care of a shrink who believes he can overcome his dolorousness with joke-telling (a story line that Kaminsky plumbs for wonderfully dry comedic effect), Fonesca hardly seems like the sort one would turn to in a crisis. Yet he manages in Midnight Pass not only to unearth Trasker, but to help a wayward wife charged with murdering her lover and save himself from being ventilated by a sniper with atrocious aim. The story contains some too-convenient turns, such as an assault on Fonesca at the site of the disputed waterway. But Kaminsky is generally a shrewd plotter, his fiction striking a fine balance between action, humor and the quirkiest of characterizations. This series' despondent protagonist might be the only one not entertained by the results. --J. Kingston Pierce
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