As the title implies, I’m in the middle of this book, so this is not a review, just some thoughts mid-way through. The book releases today, and I didn’t want to wait to say something.
Black Maria
by Christine Boyer
Book Blurb:
Business magnate Thomas Farney and Detective Felix Kosmatka both want the same thing: to catch the monster who brutally murdered Farney’s young grandson.
Thomas, brutal and savvy, didn’t become wealthy by playing by the rules or kowtowing to authority. Felix, smart but green, still believes in the integrity of law and order…and he believes solving this case may be his ticket out of his dying hometown.
Felix must team up with seasoned detective Adam Shaffer to hunt the killer. Their investigation leads them into the past-when Thomas and his coal company owned the town, and when the riches beneath the surface belonged to anyone ruthless enough to claim them. Thomas made a multitude of enemies in those lawless days, and perhaps a few followed him into the present to exact their revenge.
Set in the Pennsylvania Rust Belt in the 1970’s, Felix’s faith in his institutions is shaken when the killer reveals a difficult truth: the rich and powerful rarely pay for their own sins, and vengeance can sometimes look uncomfortably like justice.
This starts on some very familiar territory—a young, ambitious, and talented detective on a small town police force catches a murder that between its method, victim, or victim’s family is going to make it a major story. In this case, it’s all three—this powerful magnate’s young grandchild is killed in a pretty chilling way. It’s such a big deal that outside help is brought in—the two investigators have different goals, different methods, and probably different ideas about where the case should go. They form an alliance (however uneasy it may be), it’ll be tried by circumstances and their own backgrounds—their secrets may be uncovered along the way, but they’ll get their killer. We’ve seen this before—in print, TV, and film. We will see it again in all three because it works.
And it works well here—I really want to see the way that Felix and Shaffer’s relationship develops along the way—Felix is one of those detectives you can’t help but root for. I really like this guy. But Boyer isn’t just going to give us this story of the partnership, because she threw me for a loop, just when I thought I knew where this book was going.
We got a chapter from the killer’s point of view. And not in one of those aggravating chapters where they’re called “He” or “She” (with the capitals so you know who the author is talking about) and all the teasing about which character of the right gender that adjective is talking about. Nope. Boyer just names Them* (which is one of the ways that this isn’t one of those aggravating chapters). So this novel is suddenly not a whodunit, but a whydunit. We get the killer’s backstory, we get to see how They went about starting to plan the killing, and how they try to outsmart the detectives.
I don’t know exactly where Boyer is going, but..oh, I’m this close to sacrificing sleep to finding out. (I also think if I read much further, it’ll be easier to stay awake than to have some of these visuals take up residence in my subconscious.
Jo Perry’s blurb says (in part), “the place where everything in Black Maria really happens is the deep, vast, coal-dark chambered maze that is the human heart.” Having read just under 50% of this leads me to say that she’s (no surprise) dead right. You should go look for it.
* Okay, I can see how this is fun to do
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What’s the Point of Epigraphs Anyway?—good question. I learned more about epigraphs than I expected to know about them ever here.
