Murder Book - Hardcover

Rayner, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395836255 ISBN 13: 9780395836255

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1997

Synopsis

The city is Los Angles, the birthplace and terminus of the American dream, a city that has come to symbolize both heaven and hell. Billy McGrath is an enigma, half American, half English, who once dreamed of pursuing a career as an academic philosopher, but for the last fifteen years he's been a homicide detective, one of LA's best. He knows the rules, playing them perhaps better than anyone while understanding the reality of a justice system that doesn't always work, that punishes the underprivileged and lets the rich go free. He's a deeply unhappy, possibly suicidal man, divorced from a wife he still adores and separated from a ten-year-old daughter for whom he'd readily die.
McGrath is called to a crime scene - a woman dead on a kitchen floor in one of the city's less than inviting neighborhoods, a seemingly routine assignment until he discovers that the murdered woman's son is LA's biggest crack dealer, an idol of the ghetto who offers him a one-million-dollar bounty for the name of the killer. Making entirely the wrong choice for what might be the right reasons, McGrath initiates both his own fall from grace and, as he strives to redeem himself, a series of wild and furious actions that hurtle him through each of the city's multiple layers and identities.

About this title

Reviews

An ambitious and dauntingly convoluted noir-derived thriller from the author of The Elephant (1992) and the penitential memoir The Blue Suit (1995). Its protagonist and narrator, Billy McGrath, is a former philosophy student and now head of the LAPD's homicide division. Turned 40, divorced from the woman he still loves (herself a former cop, paralyzed in a shooting incident) and fumbling to be a decent father to his beloved preadolescent daughter, Billy takes very personally his latest case, the brutal torture murder of a local drug dealer's apparently innocent mother (``I thought,'' Billy muses, ``that if I could stop something like this from happening even once . . . then being a police officer would be worthwhile''). Not a chance. While compiling documentary evidence for the ``murder book'' the department keeps on (aforementioned victim) Mae Richards, Billy uncovers a snake's nest of erotic, political, and more generally criminal intrigue (not excluding his own corruptibility) that acquaints him with an O.J. Simpsonlike celebrity acquitted for his wife's murder, an obstetrician burdened by dubious medical (and other) ethics, and a wonderfully cold- blooded goon named Tookie Cross--and mushrooms into several more ingeniously nauseating killings. It's all highly readable, and quite capably plotted--despite embarrassingly close echoes of Chinatown, The Silence of the Lambs, any number of Dashiell Hammett novels, and, most egregiously, Richard Price's vastly superior Clockers. Furthermore, Billy McGrath is immensely likable in his innate decency and credibly human fallibility, but Rayner dilutes this fine characterization by allowing Billy to quote eminent sages at absurdly inappropriate junctures (e.g., while interrogating a suspect: ``Robert, do you know what Jung and William James had to say about human personality?''). Murder Book will make a hell of a TV miniseries, but it's too derivative and miscalculated to be a really effective novel. Not a bad try, but not the big one Rayner was obviously aiming for. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In Rayner's new thriller, a disillusioned L.A. cop makes a huge mistake when he's offered a cool million by the city's biggest crack dealer to name the man who murdered his mother. Rayner, who detailed the joys of petty thievery in The Blue Suit (LJ 8/95), probably hopes that this book is good enough to steal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395836255
• ISBN 13: 9780395836255
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 357