Hardcover. NY, Little, Brown and Company, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Francis X. Loughlin is an aging police detective haunted by a twenty-year-old homicide involving a young female doctor. A man named Julian Vega was put away for that crime, possibly without sufficient evidence, when he was seventeen. As Blauner's novel opens, Vega has just been released from prison, on a technicality, when Loughlin is called to investigate a crime that bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the earlier murder. Though the book sometimes takes the easy way out (the climactic twist feels both generic and arbitrary), it is elevated by Blauner's surefooted characterization of Julian. Newly free, struggling to find his way, dependent on the (somewhat tenuous) kindness of strangers, he is both sympathetic and tough; his portrait has a complexity that few authors could achieve. Clean, bright copy.
