Customer Reviews

Midnight Pass: A Lew Fonesca Mystery

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Lew Fonesca is my favorite fiction character, bar none. Kaminsky has created a character who perfectly balances today's angst with yesterday's 'work, don't think' ethics. He struggles with his depression emotionally, while doing the right things physically. He hides in old movies and exercising, but is able to put those indulgences aside when needed.

The mystery is solid in Midnight Pass, as in all Kaminsky books. But it's the character development of Lew Fonesca that offers several laugh-out-loud moments, and a few tears to be wiped away. The book is somewhat dark, but not in an angst-ridden way. The humor is subtle and intelligent. A top-notch book in an excellent series.

After hugely enjoying all of the P. P. Rostnikov novels, this was a great disappointment. I could never muster much interest or empathy toward any of the characters, most of whom seemed to be pasteboard cut-outs. The book never elicited the can't-put-it-down absorbtion of Kaminsky's Russian tales or most of the books of Michael Connelly, Archer Mayor, Peter Robinson, Colin Dexter, or John Harvey.

One of the main strengths of the Rostnikov stories was their exotic and convincing Russian setting. Florida culture and the marginal characters in this book were all too familiar to add interest to the tale.

The hero in Stuart Kaminsky's latest book, "Midnight Pass," is Lew Fonesca. Lew is a sad sack who has been chronically depressed since his wife was killed in a hit and run accident. To make ends meet, Lew works as process server in Sarasota, Florida. He does not look forward to the future, which he is positive will be bleak. He sports a well-worn Chicago Cubs cap on his balding head, and he has little use for material possessions. His friends are an odd assortment of people, quite a few of whom live on the fringes of society.

What makes this seemingly unprepossessing man worth caring about? First of all, Lew has a soft and compassionate nature. He always offers assistance to those who have been battered by life, including Adele, a young unwed mother, Flo, a recovering alcoholic, and Digger, a homeless man. In addition, although Lew is not a licensed private investigator, he is an excellent sleuth. In "Midnight Pass," Lew is hired to track down a missing wife for her distraught husband. Lew also attempts to give a dying cancer patient the opportunity to fulfill his final wish.

Kaminsky tells his story in a spare, quirky, and whimsical way. He presents an off-the-wall cast of characters who say outrageous things with a straight face. Lew's sessions with his deadpan psychologist, Ann Horowitz, are both funny and poignant. Although the mystery in "Midnight Pass" is engrossing enough, it is fairly conventional. However, Kaminsky's colorful characters and his engaging writing style will have readers clamoring for more adventures with the inimitable Lew Fonesca.

This Lew Fonesca book does not quite give us a world-class mystery, but the character development is, indeed, world class.
This is a difficult book to put down simply because the reader
does want to know more about this odd "hero," and where he is
going. As he goes along his way, he meets, and interacts with,
some odd characters, and they usually seem to have something in
common with Fonesca: they are all operating on the fringes of
acceptable society. None of them have much in the way of material possessions, or if they do, they don't care about them,
and they have their own motivations and their owns reasons for
going on.
Fonesca, although making a living of sorts, is about as much on
the fringe as the rest of them, and during those times when he
is attempting to help someone else, we have to wonder how he
can afford to even think of others when his own needs are so
acute.
This guy, Lew Fonesca, about sums up his view of life, and his
part in it, when he observes: "I work as little as I can, live as cheaply as I can, and have as little to do with people as
I can."
Quite a philosophy, and one most of us sometimes wish we could follow. But as much as he wishes he could follow his own philosophy, he keeps meeting people who need his help, and something in his character won't allow him to let the needy people walk away without hope. So he frequently agrees to help
others, when he knows he is barely able to keep himself going.
It must be this need to help others that holds him together since the sudden death of his wife. Even how he ended up in Sarasota, Florida is both simple and revealing; he says he
was feeling so depressed, he just got in his old car and started
driving, and he drove until his car quit, and he had to try to
get by just where it stopped. So he does as little as possible,
which is serving legal papers for a law firm on an occasional
basis, and he keeps trying to stay away from the public.
But some members of the public keep needing his help, and there
he is again--helping.
Author Kaminsky does a fine job with all his writing; he is one
of those people who makes it all seem easy. When it isn't.
His ability to write, and especially to develop interesting
characters, grows stronger.
You need to read this one to see just how a character is developed. Most people will hate to see this story end.

I'm surprised this book hasn't received better reviews. I found it quite good. The author weaves two separate plots together in ways that are clever and suspenseful, while maintaining a strong interest in Fonesca's state of mind. He does it with spare prose and telling details. It's obvious this is the work of an accomplished professional.

I don't recall the details of the previous couple of books in this series, but I think this may be the first time Kaminsky has woven themes from films into his telling of Fonesca's tale. This gives the book more color -- it seems not as bleak as the first two in the series. The sessions with Fonesca's psychologist have the same effect, while also introducing some humor into the proceedings. There's also a very funny scene (which doesn't actually have anything to do with the main storyline) in which Fonesca interviews a witness to a murder and extracts quite a few details the police missed.

The flaws in this novel are few and minor. For one thing, the copyediting was sloppily done -- there are a slightly greater than average number of obvious typos. There are also a few places where I couldn't shake the sense that the author, in an effort to be as laconic as his sleuth, ended up making things confusing for the reader. And finally, the author's apparent carelessness about religion comes through in two details: would you expect a southern black church to have stained glass windows depicting the Stations of the Cross, and a congregation singing 'Faith of Our Fathers'? I doubt it. Those are both well-known features of a Catholic Church, which the Church in question clearly is not.

But these are nit-picky details. Read the book. You'll like it. Stuart M. Kaminsky didn't win the Grandmaster Edgar Award for nothing, you know.

Mr. Kaminsky is a gifted writer but this is not his best series. If you haven't read Lieberman's Choice or Lieberman's Folly, try them instead of Lew Fonesca. If you have read Lieberman then you know what Mr. Kaminsky is capable of. So try his Inspector Rostnikow series. Still this is a good beach book.

I've read the other Lew Fonesca books and found Midnight Pass to be not as good as the other books. Not bad, but not as good.

I love the Lew Fanesco series. These books are wonderful with great characters. I can hardly wait for the next one. A wonderful portrale of Sarasota FL. I'm going to have to make a trip down there to find the dairy queen! Loved it.

surely it is worth five stars, is it not? This was the third novel in a series featuring Lew Fonesca, a grieving widower who relocates from Chicago to Florida and nearly gives up on life. It was the first of the series that I read, but now I've added book one, Vengeance, and book two, Retribution, and am about to start on the newest, Denial. Fonesca fascinates me. Through the four books, which probably cover less than two years in his life, he slowly builds a new network of family and friends and even a love interest. He solves mysteries, taking jobs as a finder of missing persons and as a process server. He gets into danger. He does not commit acts of violence. He lives simply, but thinks deeply. He believes he does not "feel" deeply anymore, due to the tragic loss of his wife, but his actions prove that he does. Kaminsky writes a ton of books, with five different series heroes, and all of them are worth checking out.

I definitely ordered this as a Lew Fonesca novel and enjoyed it as such. In fact I am ordering the new one, Denial.