Bad Memory
by Jim Cliff
DETAILS: Series: Jake Abraham, #2 Publisher: Antbear Books Publication Date: May 2, 2017 Format: eBook Length: 104 pg. Read Date: February 1, 2023
“I need you to find out what happened to her. I need to know who killed her.”
“The paper says suicide,” I helpfully pointed out. Case closed. That was easy.
“They’re wrong.”
“You seem pretty sure about that.”
“I was there when she died.”
What’s Bad Memory About?
Jake Abraham’s a P.I. who probably should’ve gone into another line of work, all things considered. But he didn’t, and it turns out that he has a knack for this kind of thing (see The Shoulders of Giants).
Jake’s approached by a client* who wants to him to look into a twenty-three old suicide. She was nearby, she says, when the woman died, and what she remembers hearing makes her certain it wasn’t a suicide. She was pressured into staying silent back then, but the reasons for that have disappeared and now she wants to unburden her conscience.
* I’m pretty sure she was a character in the earlier novel, but after 6+ years, I don’t remember—and I’m too lazy to check
Jake starts looking into this—talking to his detective friend, coworkers of the deceased, and the man who pressured his client into staying quiet. What he discovers doesn’t add up to a tidy suicide like the police had determined—but it doesn’t rule it out either.
Well, except for the people who aren’t doing an incredibly subtle tailing job on him all of the sudden. He’s not doing anything else that should draw anyone’s attention.
Cliff’s Voice
It wasn’t the first time I’d had a gun pointed at me, but it doesn’t get any more fun.
Like with The Shoulders of Giants, Cliff’s voice—the snappy PI patter in both the first-person narration and Jake’s dialogue—wins me over. It’s like Stout enjoying himself, early Crais, or Parker at his lightest. It just sings.
I really don’t need a good story to make me enjoy reading something told with this (or a similar) voice. Thankfully, Cliff delivers a good story, too—making it all the more enjoyable.
So, what did I think about Bad Memory?
There aren’t many perks to being a licensed private investigator. We can’t arrest people, we can’t tap people’s phones, we can’t even go through people’s mail. We’re basically private citizens with tenacious personalities.
This novella is precisely what I needed—I’d just finished two long-ish reads that were pretty heavy and taken a lot out of me emotionally. This was quick, satisfying, and filled with some snappy writing. It was a nice change of pace and tone, giving me the chance to catch my breath before diving into another full novel.
Even if it didn’t serve that purpose for me, I’d have been glad to read this—it scratches that P.I. itch in just the right way.
There was a moment when I thought that the book was trying too hard to convince me that Suspect X was guilty, and so I started to wonder who else it could’ve been. But then I remembered that this was a novella and Cliff didn’t have space to be that clever—so I shifted to trying to figure out why X was guilty. If he’d had another 100+ pages in the book and X was still guilty, I’d likely have complained about it. But given the space restraints, I have no problem with X.
Short, sweet, and to the point. This novella got the job done and makes me wish that Cliff wrote faster.
