Family Values: a Mario Balzic novel. & Family Values: Advanced Reading Copy

Gliding on his pension and reflecting on his life, Mario Balzic wishes he could start all over. He's about to get his wish.
Balzic is haunting his home, driving his wife, Ruth, crazy. She wants him out of the house, but she doesn't want him back in law enforcement. Balzic's haunting Muscotti's, driving Vinnie the bartender crazy. He's at the tavern, a man whose single greatest asset is time on his hands, when Deputy Attorney General Warren Livingood, the well-dressed refugee from Philadelphia's Main Line, walks in - and makes his case to western Pennsylvania's crankiest and canniest ex-cop.
Seventeen years before, a drug deal went sour in a mountain log cabin, yielding two corpses and an ensuing history of mistrials, appeals, and verdict reversals. Now a variety of cons from a variety of prisons are spilling several variations on this single sorry tale. The stench of police misconduct and coerced perjury is in the air. High political reputations are on the line. As a former professional with no debts to settle, Balzic is the man for the job. Livingood gives him the title of special investigator, state credentials, and thirty-five dollars an hour.
It seems like the answer to everyone's prayers. Then Balzic's jailhouse interviews lead him into a jurisdiction that could be the devil's own. There he confronts his counterpart, but hardly his brother: a small-town police chief, now paralyzed by stroke, who in his prime ruled his borough by blood and terror. In uncovering the history of one monster in human form, Balzic will enter his personal heart of darkness - and shoulder a staggering debt that will be hell to pay.

Great news for Mario Balzic's many fans: The retired police chief of Rocksburg, Pa. (Good Sons, 1995, etc.), is back in the saddle again--all except for a little piece of one ear (vide the priceless opening scene). As if in answer to his exasperated wife Ruth's prayers, Balzic is offered a temporary job at $35 an hour working for the Attorney General's office. Citing new evidence, jailhouse lawyer Lester Walin, n‚ Walczinsky, has demanded a post-conviction hearing in re the killing of two druggies 17 years before. The evidence: Hubert Scumacci, the witness who swore that he drove pothead Lester to the fatal rendezvous, now says the shooter was somebody else; and Edgar Patter, a convicted perjurer who helped put Lester away back then, has produced a document that he says proves Lester was in Ohio the night of the murders and can't have seen a thing. Heartened by the promise that these no-account felons will now tell the truth, probably for the first time in their lives, Lester insists that he has an alibi: a set of Polaroid shots he never produced before for reasons the subject of the photos makes grotesquely clear. Investigating this serpentine latest round of claims and counterclaims will take Balzic deep into the heart of one of the most monstrous families in mystery annals. ``Sometimes,'' Balzic concludes, ``you learn things, which the minute you learn `em you wish you hadn't.'' All too true for him, though not for his lucky readers. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Through a baker's dozen Mario Balzic novels, Constantine has treated readers to some of the best mystery writing done in the last 25 years. Faithful readers have grown old with the wily chief of police of Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, and mourned the economic free fall that has ravaged his small Rust Belt city. Now two books into his retirement, Mario and his wife, Ruth, are at each other's throats as they wrestle with adjusting to his retirement. Enter a Main Line aristocrat who hires Mario as a special investigator for the Attorney General's Office. His charge is to look into a 17-year-old double murder and the possibility that a spectacularly vicious and corrupt chief of police railroaded his own son with perjured testimony. The investigation leads Mario first to a series of prisons, where he interviews the principals in the case, and ultimately brings him face to face with the most sordid and appalling set of family values he has ever encountered. With the wonderfully human but world-weary Mario at his most appealing, this makes an outstanding addition to one of the best mystery series ever published. Thomas Gaughan