Customer Reviews

The Night Watchman (Ray Quinn Series, Book 1)

5 star:		(48)
4 star:		(48)
3 star:		(20)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have read many mysteries but this is only the second one in the Christian mystery sub-genre and I wasn't sure what to expect. This is a little twist on the genre because Ray Quinn (the main character and narrator) not only is not a Christian, he doesn't think much of them and his feelings on the subject don't change dramatically throughout the book. But there are a couple Christian characters who express their faith, though not so much as to get in the way of the mystery.

Other than those Christian characters, the most notable difference from most of the mysteries I read was in the language. In this book, no one swears; not the cops and not even the "dirt bag" characters. And there is no sex. So if foul language and gratuitous sex scenes make you avoid contemporary mysteries, this one will be safe for you.

Ray Quinn, former homicide detective on medical retirement from the Orlando Police Department, is an interesting main character because of his brokenness. Many detectives in mystery novels are imperfect, but Ray is both physically and emotionally damaged. As a result of a shooting a year before the book opens, he has nearly constant pain and walks with a cane. His former partner and lover died in the attack so he has emotional pain and guilt. He works as a night watchman at a condominium complex to supplement his benefits; away from work he drinks a lot of Jim Beam and watches John Wayne movies.

The other main characters are: Pam, the sister of a man presumed to have died in a murder-suicide with a stripper, Crevis, the eager-beaver bumbling kid who shares the night watchman shift with Ray, and various cops (one of which has bad blood with Ray). The story is told first person from Ray's point of view, which is not my favorite writing style but I got used to it.

If anyone wonders whether standards are lower in the Christian fiction world, I thought this mystery was as well written as most of the "regular" entries in the mystery genre. It isn't up there with the very best mystery writers but I would definitely place it alongside the majority of "good but not great" books I've read in the past year or so. This is the first book in a series featuring Ray and Crevis as private investigators; I'd be happy to read the next one.

Mark Mynheir is known primarily for his "Truth Chasers" series of books. "The Night Watchmen" is his latest novel and isn't officially a part of that series, though it actually could be. Ray Quinn is a homicide detective put out of commission due to a horribly violent incident that took the life of his partner. Now Ray works as a night watchman at a condo while hiding his pain in alcohol. But soon his life of hiding will end as an apparent murder-suicide in one of the condos throws Ray unofficially back into the role of detective. He must search for answers the cops want it buried.

This story is a great thriller and works on many levels. The thing about Mynheir is his ability to make you care about his characters and see them as more than just words on a page. The surprisingly lonely life "beyond the badge" takes front and center here as we see Quinn fighting to solve the mystery while at the same time struggling to rise from his depression. Add a mysterious killer stalking him to the mix and you have a winning thriller. Highly recommended!

Like the other reviewers I was given a copy of this book to review. I am a recreational reader of detective and police procedural fiction. I always have been.
Unfortunately, I am not nearly as impressed as the first two reviewers. Writing is a craft-one that must be honed over many years. Mynheir is a fairly good writer but he has a long way to go before he joins the first rank of mystery writers.
This is where I will get in trouble. For Mynheir is writing two different novels here. The first is a fairly good crime procedural novel. As the first two reviewers have noted, Mynheir's protaganist, Ray Quinn, is a ex-homicide detective who received a medical disability retirement after being viciously shot on the job. But Mynheir is also writing a conversion novel or, at least, the first part of one. (Spoiler alert) His fiance was killed as part of that same shooting and he blames himself. He is working on becoming a drunkard. Mynheir wants us to see him as someone who has lost everything but who is brought around to an openness toward God as a result of his investigation in this book.
Unfortunately, for me, none of it worked. Quinn is fairly well fleshed out but no one else is. The main women characters are cut out of cardboard. None of the conversion experiences seem very powerful. Even the police procedure could have been written more convincingly. Toward the beginning, Quinn is brought up short by one detail he notices in a crime scene picture. Mynheir even uses it as the plot punch line to end a chapter (p. 39). He just never bothers to ever tell us which one particular point it is.
Obviously, how you react to Mynheir's book will depend on how interested you are to the combination of the conversion genre with the detective genre. For me, at this point in the series it did not work. Mynheir may yet pull it off. Many authors improve over the course of a series. But I found this to be a very uneven start. Maybe that is because I am the bitter cynic that Ray Quinn is supposed to be. Or maybe it is because there are better books to read.

I feel silly, but it wasn't until I was 85% done with this book that I actually read the entire description on the back of this book. In my defense, it is rather wordy....

Anyway, it was not until that point that I realized that this was actually a "Christian" cop book. That doesn't bother me since I'm a Christian. But, my experiences with Christian fiction have been mosty negative. A lot of it is clumsy, to say the least.

So, I guess this is a long way to say that this one was not clumsy. Instead, it was different. It is a "Christian" detective story in which the main character is not Christian. Not even searching. Not even close. He carries a big gun and he uses it lots of times. He lies. He cheats. Praying bothers him. He suspects that church-going people are weak and does not believe that God can change a person's life.

So, on to the book. The main character is Ray Quinn, a homocide detective
that has been forced to retire due to injury. He walks very slowly with a cane. Now, he's the night watchman at a condo building. He becomes convinced that a murder-suicide at the building is really a double murder and the story gets going.

The book was enjoyable. Ray is an interesting character and the give-and-take with his night watchman Crevis is often humorous. The fact that he cannot beat up everyone or use the resources of the police/legal system makes him interesting - he has to improvise and think more. The mystery is realistic although I thought it wrapped up a little too neatly.

This is the first in a new series of mysteries centered around Ray Quinn. I'll be keeping my eye out for more.

This is the first book by Mark Mynheir that I've read, and I was favorably impressed.

The story is interesting, multi-faceted, and moves along at a reasonable pace; and the characters are generally believable and well drawn.

There are actually at least three stories here. The main story involves a pastor who apparently killed his stripper-girlfriend and then himself. The pastor's sister insists that her brother was a good Christian, refuses to accept the police conclusion that it was a murder-suicide, and pleads with Ray Quinn, an ex-homicide detective, now medically retired, to look into the case. Quinn, still depressed about the career-ending injuries he suffered a year earlier, reluctantly agrees to look into it. Of course, Quinn's second-guessing of his former colleagues' investigation causes quite a bit of friction, but he keeps turning up new evidence indicating that there's much more to the case than what the official investigation concluded.

The second story is that Quinn's own shooting is still an open case. In fact, a year has gone by, and the police still don't even have a suspect. So while Quinn is meddling in the pastor-stripper case, he's also trying to get the police to keep working on his own case. The police aren't too thrilled about that either. Quinn left the force under a pretty dark cloud, because not only did he get himself shot, but his partner was killed in the same shooting.

Finally, there's a religious theme of sin and redemption. Quinn had been a major smart aleck when he was on the force, so when he screwed up and got his partner killed and himself shot to pieces, there weren't many friends there to support him through his agonizing and ultimately not very successful physical rehab. Engulfed in anger, guilt, and depression, Quinn finds the steadfast faith and optimism of the dead pastor's sister hard to take.

The book works its way toward a very satisfying conclusion for all three stories.

There are apparently going to be some more "Night Watchman" mysteries in the future. I suspect they will be well received and deservedly so.

I read `The Night Watchman' over the course of five days while on vacation. It was a nice mystery that kept me wondering until the last chapter that included the classic whodunit format of bringing all the suspects together at the murder scene(I admit it was not whom I suspected). Still in my mind the overall story was just average. John D MacDonald and Patricia Cornwell need not worry about competition.

Still, for the audience for which this was intended, the readers of Christian Themed Paperbacks, this is a very good narrative. I wouldn't say it's as good as some of Frank Peretti or the Thoene's better works but is a good non offensive mystery. For an ex cop Ray sure doesn't swear much.

Ray Quinn is an ex cop crippled in the line of duty in a shooting that also took the life of Trish his partner and girlfriend. Working now as a night watchman at an Orlando condominium he is thrust into the middle of a scandal when a local inner city minister is found shot dead in one of the units with a stripper in an apparent murder/suicide.

The Minister's sister Pam convinces Ray to investigate the case after his former colleagues close the file. She believes her brother was incapable of murder or fornication and though Ray has a hard heart he takes the case to prove a rival wrong even though he is very uncomfortable around Pam and her "God stuff".

Soon Ray's investigation begins to find the stripper was being convicted of her lifestyle by her platonic relationship with the young minister and that she was about to leave the Club where she was working as a Dancer and Prostitute for a group of Wealthy Well-connected men. Ray soon finds his own life endangered as a vast conspiracy with ties to local politicians and police and his own crippling and partner's murder begins to unravel.

I did like `The Night Watchman' overall. There are no really offensive images even though several scenes take place inside an `Exotic' Nightclub. For the number of policeman around there is no cursing. You expect Ray and Pam to get together and for her to lead him to Christ but it doesn't happen. Ray has been `touched by an Angel' so to speak but at the end of the book still has not converted which leads me to believe the Series may be about his journey to salvation.

Ray Quinn is a damaged former Orlando police officer; damaged in both mind and body. Severely injured in a shooting that killed his partner, he has left the force and is working in a condominium facility at night.

On his watch, a pastor and an exotic dancer are found dead in one of the condominiums. At first it's pegged as a murder-suicide, but something doesn't quite add up to Ray. With the help of his co-worker Crevis, and the sister of the pastor, Pam, he begins to look a bit closer at a case that he is beginning to suspect is no twisted love affair gone wrong, but a heinous crime that goes to the heart of the business community-and the police department-in Orlando.

The mark of a good book is when you are looking forward to the opportunity to find some reading time to get back into the book. The Night Watchman certainly qualifies on this score. One twist in this book is the religious angle; Quinn may or may not have had a divine visit on the day he was shot.

Recommended. The book is fast-paced, has the ring of truth when it comes to police procedure, and has believable characters. One does hope, though, that author Mynheir spends more time on character development. We feel we know the protagonist of the story, Ray Quinn, well, but his sidekick Crevis and the other characters aren't as completely developed. Crevis, in particular, plays a big part in the book, but we have very little background on him, and I never really did understand the character well.

Since the book is set up for a sequel, we can hope secondary characters are better developed.

Murder, mystery, suspense, thriller - all those things appealed to me, but I wasn't sure about the Christian aspect. Maybe I'm just strange, but for me murder, mystery, and sermons just don't mix well. Fortunately the Christian aspect of Night Watchman is there but subtle and understated which I think makes for a more effective story. The reader will find no graphic sex in this book, and no vulgar language, elements that are often added to books and movies for no good purpose.

Ray Quinn starts out as a not so likeable character, but he grows on the reader and actually becomes a character one cares about by the end of the book. He's a man who reveals his humanity and inner feelings slowly.

I like this book enough that I'm looking forward to the sequels to come, and like the author's style enough to have purchased the first two books of his Truth Chaser series. Mynheir is not Doyle or Christie, but Night Watchman was an enjoyable, fast-paced read, one that I was sorry to finish.

Ray Quinn is a police detective retired on disability and working as a rent-a-cop at an apartment complex. In his spare time he watches John Wayne movies and drinks heavily to kill the physical pain of the shooting that changed his life, and the emotional pain of the loss of his partner in that same incident. Against his better judgment, he becomes involved in trying to solve the murder-suicide of a minister and a call girl at the apartment complex where he works, and while uncovering the secrets behind the seemingly isolated crime, uncovers a political cesspool that threatens not only his life, but that of the only people he has learned to care for since his life changed so tragically.

I think Mark Mynheir's character, Ray Quinn, has terrific potential for future development. I also think the dialogue in The Night Watchman, with the exception of that which included most of the female characters, was extremely natural and realistic - a skill that can cover for a lot of other shortcomings in any book. I would like to see the Barney Fife-ish sidekick get toned down a little, and if the female lead stays on as a love interest, she's going to need at least one shameful secret - come on Mark.

I would classify The Night Watchman as a Christian thriller, but different from the usual book under that heading in that Mynheir respects his reader as someone who is no stranger to human weakness and the darkness of the human heart, as opposed to representing these as being the result of impersonal evil let loose in the world. Both positions work with the genre, but this one is a more practical approach, in my opinion.

I'd never read anything else by Mark Mynheir, but I was intrigued when I saw this on the Amazon Vine program because I like the crime genre in general and I live in Orlando - I thought it was cool that The Night Watchman was based in Orlando, as it's not a very popular location setting for fiction works.

Mynheir is a retired police detective, and generally gets it right when it comes to both realism and entertainment. Too many works in the genre are either ridiculously unrealistic, or bogged down with the author's narrow minded political views. Mynheir generally does a good job telling a crime story, with an interesting, suspenseful if a bit formulaic plot. He also captures the spirit of Orlando well, and note this is the real Orlando (centered around the downtown area), not the touristy area further west.

After ordering this book, I read some of the reviews and was a bit turned off when I realized this is a "Christian" novel, whatever that means. I myself am not religious so I was a little worried that it would come across as preachy, but that generally isn't the case - I don't think I'd even realized it if I hadn't read it in reviews, though there are some subtle characteristics (for example - no swearing is in this novel) that don't take away from the story. There is one scene towards the end that, to those who aren't religious, may seem a little cheesy, but it really doesn't take away from the overall book at all.

Overall - a solid work.