Midnight Pass: A Lew Fonesca Mystery - Hardcover

Stuart M. Kaminsky

3.89

241 ratings by Goodreads

9780786260355: Midnight Pass: A Lew Fonesca Mystery

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786260351 ISBN 13: 9780786260355

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2004

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An Edgar Award-winning Author

For a guy just trying to get by, Lew Fonesca has a pretty full plate. His shrink wants him to dump the grief that he's been carrying around since his wife's tragic death. A lady friend wants to deepen their friendship. On top of that, a local minister asks him to find a missing town council member, and a distraught father wants Lew to track down his wife and two kids. When people start showing up dead, Lew knows he's in way over his head.

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Review:

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

From the Inside Flap:

Praise for Stuart M. Kaminsky and the Lew Fonesca series

"Readers will be demanding the sequel before they've finished the debut."
--Booklist (starred review) on Vengeance

"Kaminsky's sense of place is faultless... He grabs readers and takes them on a memorably tumultuous ride of violent dips and turns."
--Publishers Weekly (starred review) on Vengeance

"Though both cases seem predictable, Kaminsky pulls off a climactic surprise for each one. The biggest news, though, is his depressed little Lancelot in Levi's, who's worth at least a dozen more installments."
--Kirkus Reviews (pointer review) on Vengeance

"Lew Fonesca's sensitivity, common sense, and keen wit make him a likable, intriguing character... This series will be a popular one."
--Romantic Times (4 � stars) on Vengeance

"Kaminsky is such a pro that the pages fly by, and even though Lew is often such a sad sack, it's hard not to root for him."
--Chicago Tribune on Retribution

"Lew is a triumph: a Lew Archer type with nerve endings so sensitive that when he's asked, 'Anybody dead?' he replies, 'Most of the people who ever lived.'"
--Kirkus Reviews on Retribution

"Perhaps it is time to declare award-winning Stuart Kaminsky as the reigning monarch of excellent detective series."
--Midwest Book Review

"Stuart Kaminsky is hard to beat for a thoughtful, well-plotted, well-written mystery."
--The Washington Post Book World

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