Steve Hamilton - Night Work (2007)
Reviewed by Yvette Banek
In this departure from the Alex McKnight series set in Michigan’s cold Northern peninsula, author Steve Hamilton has come home to upstate New York with an intriguing new hero and the same enviable talent for creating a specifically unique sense of place in which to set his characters. He is an author who works from the inside out, though at first glance one might think otherwise. Within a slew of thriller writers trying to make themselves heard, Steve Hamilton’s voice continues to be one of kind.
In Night Work, we meet Joe Trumbull: a quiet, pragmatic man whose reach is as broad as the countryside he travels on behalf of his “clients.” He is also a guy struggling to recover from the trauma of an unspeakable crime. As we’ve come to expect from author Hamilton, his hero has much to brood about. But first, Hamilton does a masterful job of establishing Joe’s milieu and the appreciation and devotion he has for a difficult job.
When not at work, Joe can be found listening to soulful jazz or boxing in the gym downstairs from his lonely apartment. He has also, as we soon discover, never given up hoping for a resolution to the crime which has all but destroyed his life: the murder of his fiancée Laurel.
Now, two years later, he’s just beginning to date again when the murder of another woman thrusts Joe into a nightmarish world in which nothing makes any sense. On the point of regaining his bearings, he is sent reeling. The murder cannot be seen as anything other than personal as Joe appears, yet again, to be trapped at the center of a violent crime. Random can no longer be taken for granted – by anyone.
This time out, as the police wonder if they should have taken a colder, harder look at him for Laurel’s murder, Joe Trumbull is cast adrift. Not knowing friend from foe, it slowly dawns on him that he has a deadly enemy whose motives are unknown. With no one to turn to, and as the trail of violence increases, Joe can only work to save himself from an ever tightening snare by solving the crimes one step ahead of a pair of kibitzing cops intent on their own interpretation.
So he begins by going backwards. Maybe there among his probationary files, he can dig out the kernel of hatred motivating a heartless killer. Joe is in for discoveries of a different sort too as he queries likely suspects and finds that his work in the community has garnered some unexpected results.
Complete with the wallop of a harrowing ending, Night Work will keep you reading late into the night as you wonder just how Joe will survive the truth.
Though not as deeply, darkly gripping as the Alex McKnight books, this latest entry from the pen (or keyboard) of one of our most talented writers is quite good enough and better than most.
Posted by Yvette Banek in Book Reviews | Permalink
Comments
Thanks Yvette! Your review makes me want to read this book ASAP.
Here's a thriller for you that I thought of because you post about a unique sense of place -- Prophecy by Paul Mark Tag. I just finished it myself, and I also was up late into the night (OK, early morning) to find out what the ending would be. I learned from his website (http://www.paulmarktag.com) that not only did he go to nearly all of the locations in his book, he actually has a link on the website to Google Earth photographs that go along with the chapters in Prophecy -- talk about making the action come alive!
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Cheers,
Linda
Posted by: Linda | Nov 19, 2007 6:55:19 PM
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