If you have passed by our newly established MysteryPeople section, you’ll notice a new display: New Crimes. We now have an area for the latest in the latest in mystery and crime fiction. Each week, you can take a look at what’s new from gentlemen sleuths to down and dirty criminals.
On the display there will be a pick of the month, a book that I, MysteryPeople’s crime fiction coordinator, think is one of the recent best. I’m happy to have our first one by my favorite private eye writer, Reed Farrel Coleman’s Innocent Monster.
We find his series character, put-upon wine store owner and sometime private eye, Moe Prager, alone after his second divorce. To have a chance of reconnecting with his estranged daughter, he looks into the the disappearance of her friend’s daughter, Sashi Bluntstone, an eleven year old modern art prodigy. Moe’s search takes him through some of the ugliest sides of the art world. Critics and resentful artists host websites showing Sashi’s torture, while greedy dealers hope she dies so her paintings go up in value. Even her parents, who are using her as a meal ticket, prove not to entirely have her best interest at heart.
Coleman has a way of tapping into his characters feelings and sins (particularly his hero’s) like nobody else, making them relate-able to our own. He holds up an emotion; showing the different facets of it. His jazz nocturne style prose slips into Moe’s point of view so well, we truly care about the chance he’s given at a better life and hope he doesn’t blow it.
I’m also happy announce that the hard to find fourth and fifth books in the Moe Prager series, Soul Patch and Empty Ever After, have been reprinted, each with a new short story, by Busted Flush Press. Now you can get all six books that follow one of the most human series characters I’ve ever read.
–Scott Montogomery
BookPeople 