Amazon.com Review
Penzler Pick, July 2001: One of the greatest disappointments for a mystery aficionado is to find an author or a series detective that you absolutely adore, only to have the author disappear or the character be killed off.
Conan Doyle tried to do it to Sherlock Holmes, throwing him off the edge of the Reichenbach Falls (happily to resurrect him some years later), and
Nicholas Freeling did it to Inspector Van Der Valk, permanently alienating his readers.
Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo planned 10 books about Martin Beck, and within days of completing the 10th adventure of the Swedish policeman, Wahloo died, ensuring no further books in the series.
Not quite so dramatically, Michael Malone apparently fell off the face of the earth. (He became a highly successful television writer, which is almost the same thing.) Today, even some sophisticated readers of mystery fiction have forgotten Malone, who wrote two masterpieces involving a pair of detectives in a small town in North Carolina, Justin Savile and Cuddy Mangum: Uncivil Seasons, one of the few nearly perfect novels in the history of detective fiction, published in 1983; and Time's Witness, in 1989. Unlike too many cops portrayed in detective fiction as stupid, corrupt, or both, Justin and Cuddy are fully developed as intelligent, honest cops who try to do their jobs as well as possible, even though they have their human flaws. Cuddy is arrogant and impatient; Justin drinks too much and likes the ladies a bit more than he should, seeing how he's married (just barely now, as his wife has moved out of the house). First Lady is the first volume about these terrific characters in more than decade. Thankfully, Malone's publisher is also releasing the first two books in trade paperback editions, which I can recommend as strongly as anything I've praised in Amazon.com's pages.
Very little is as it seems in this poetically written mystery novel. A serial killer seems to be on the loose, but is he really a serial killer? Justin discovers a pattern that seems brilliantly thought out and then, as in E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case, holes are punched through the theory by various members of the law enforcement community (including, in this case, two women from the FBI). First Lady is utterly contemporary, with some gruesomely described violence and a healthy dose of (very discreet) sex, but it's also a wonderfully constructed old-fashioned puzzler, with a cornucopia of clever clues, a near-surplus of suspicious suspects, and a boatful of red herrings guaranteed to fool the most assiduous armchair detective.
Welcome back, Mr. Malone. And don't make us wait another dozen years for the next Justin and Cuddy novel! --Otto Penzler
From Publishers Weekly
Malone, who created a stir a decade ago with some award-winning mystery-thrillers (Fast Love; Red Clay), returns after a long absence with this North Carolina-based thriller starring his likable previous protagonists, police chief Cuddy Mangum and his chief of homicide, Lt. Justin Savile V. They are up against a serial killer dubbed by the local press Guess Who, whose female victims are left looking like martyred saints; media attention steps up a notch when one of his victims may be world-famous Irish rock singer Mavis Mahar, in Hillston for a concert. There are myriad complications: Mavis may be having an affair with the governor of the state, whose wife Cuddy has long hankered after; a crooked attorney general promptly shows up at the scene of Mavis's apparent murder and destroys a heap of evidence. Meanwhile, the bodies including that of a woman judge in a prominent local murder case keep piling up, while Cuddy and Justin are running into dead ends in their search for suspects. Malone knows his turf, and his local politics are convincingly sketched in, with many welcome touches of humor. There are plenty of false moves, too, however: Justin's romance with Mavis is not convincing, and any perceptive reader will have spotted the killer long before the vaunted cops and their female FBI helpmeets do. There are also many beguiling byways of local lore, which Malone loves to lead us down, but which severely slow the narrative thrust. (Sept.)Forecast: Malone retains a loyal fan base and Sourcebooks will be pushing hard to make this a success by reaching them plus a vast new readership. Among the publisher's initiatives are a prepub author tour through the South, New England and the West Coast and a 12-city post-pub tour, as well as 30,0000 reading group guides and bookmarks. Expect high interest and healthy sales.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
