Tag: Black Maria

DETAILS:
Publisher: Run Amok Crime
Publication Date: October 1, 2024
Format: ARC
Length: 243 pg.
Read Date: September 30-October 1, 2024

What’s Black Maria About?

Detective Felix Kosmatka knows he shouldn’t think of this murder case being a launching pad for his career—his ticket out of the hometown where everyone of a certain age (including the police department’s receptionist) still uses an embarrassing nickname. But thinking about that does help distract him from a sight that threatens to make him lose his lunch.

The grandson of the region’s richest person has been found in his bed with his throat slit. There’s no sign of a break-in, nothing is missing, and everyone is accounted for (except for his father).

The grieving grandfather is prominent enough that a specialist from outside of area is brought into this small Pennsylvania mining town to help Felix. Detective Adam Shaffer wants to find the obvious answer, but Felix isn’t sure that Occam’s razor applies here and is determined to find something deeper.

In this former coal town, there’s plenty of deeper and darker places to go. By the time this investigation ends, everyone in the Department and everyone touched by the case will changed in one way or another.

My Other Post About the Book

Last Tuesday, I posted my thoughts about the book at about 100 pages in. In this post, I made some guesses about where I thought the book was going to go. It took less than 60 pages* for Boyer to prove me wrong. Very wrong about a lot of it—the kind of wrong where it might have felt like she was rubbing my nose in it, if I cared. Which I really didn’t—I was having too much fun reading the thing.

* I could tell you exact pages for both of these points, but I won’t to preserve a little bit of surprise.

Also, the formatting on the post was questionable and says a lot about the rush I was in to get it done on time. It’s actually more embarrassing than how wrong I was about the book (because it’s entirely my fault, and not because of a clever writer).

So…can I explain why I was wrong without giving much away? Not really—but I can say that I made the same mistake that both the detectives (and others) made.

So, what did I think about Black Maria?

There’s a lot that was impressive about this book—there’s a solid twist that derailed me, and some really well executed reveals throughout.

This is a police procedural where the whodunit isn’t that interesting (and is given away really quickly), the howdunit is pretty obvious (although the reasoning behind the how…), it’s all about the why and when. The how/if the killer gets caught comes in as a close second.

Boyer gets the people—the detectives, the killer, the victims, and the relatives of them all (and anyone else I didn’t mention). There are a lot of rich backstories at work here—we don’t get them all, we actually get very few of them. We get flashes of several others, just enough to tempt you, really. It feels like everyone tied to law enforcement (and more than a few others) could be part of a long-running series, and we only get to see them in this one installment. It’s a nice touch.

A lot of this novel wouldn’t work if it wasn’t told in the early 1970s, but I still wonder why that was important to Boyer to do. Did she start with an element of the story and/or a desire to tell something having to do with it, and then had go put the rest of the story there (and which element was that?). Or does she really just like that period of American/Pennsylvanian history? I don’t think it matters, but I’m curious.

I don’t know that except for the thing I alluded to in the previous section that I was ever blown away by the writing or the plot. But at every point, it was clear that Boyer was executing her vision exactly the right way. This is a solid piece of writing from someone I’d gladly pick up another book or three from. I might not be moved to rave about this book, but I will gladly recommend it widely. This is the way to do a historical mystery.

Disclaimer: I was provided a copy of this ARC by the publisher, without any expectation that I would post about it. My choice to do so, and what I chose to say are mine alone.

4 Stars

This post contains an affiliate link. If you purchase from it, I will get a small commission at no additional cost to you. As always, the opinions expressed are my own.
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In Medias Res: Black Maria by Christine Boyer

By HCNewton

On October 1, 2024

In Currently Reading, Fiction, In Medias Res, Mystery/Detective Fiction/Crime Fiction/Thriller

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