Amazon.com Review
Penzler Pick, November 2001: William Tapply's Brady Coyne novels have long delivered meticulous plots and a strong moral sense, and
Past Tense, the series' 18th entry, lives up to that solid standard. (Having for a time been Tapply's publisher, I speak both as a fan and as one familiar with his professionalism.)
Coyne, a Boston attorney in private practice with a penchant for good-Samaritan trouble-shooting, is one of those mystery heroes in whom decency is perhaps the paramount characteristic. Liked equally by men and women, Brady usually manages to keep a level head when bad things start to happen, but always in a believable way. He sometimes gets things wrong, but that's okay because he'll usually find a way to sort them out.
A steady intelligence is always present, and the reader increasingly appreciates the carefulness with which his creator regards the human condition: the relationships between men and women, parents and children, workers and their colleagues, the guilty and the innocent. Betrayal, above all, is something he seems to have made a special area of study.
Past Tense opens as Brady and his current lady friend, Evie Banyon, are headed off to a Cape Cod rental for a long weekend's getaway. At a local seafood shanty, after a satisfying lobster feast, their idyll suddenly is shattered by an intrusion from Evie's past. Even after she has hauled off and slapped the insolent stranger staring at her from the bar (a man she accuses of having followed her there, much to Brady's confused astonishment), Brady doesn't expect to discover the fellow dead outside their cottage the next morning.
The question soon becomes not "Who was the late Larry Scott?" but "Who is Evelyn Banyon?" This is a little too close to home as far as Brady is concerned, and it only gets worse when Evie disappears, seeming not to want Brady to find her. The answers to the baffling turn of events lie in Evie's past--and in Brady's desire to remain part of her future. --Otto Penzler
From Publishers Weekly
Brady Coyne is appealing and modest both qualities that apply to this somewhat insubstantial mystery, Tapply's 18th to feature the Boston attorney (after 2000's Scar Tissue). He and girlfriend Evie Banyon are off to Cape Cod for a romantic weekend of "making love and eating lobster," but before their lobster tails are fully cracked, Evie's mysterious past shows up in the form of Larry Scott, ex-lover turned stalker, and a very public confrontation at a seaside restaurant. Their tryst is completely ruined when Evie discovers Scott's dead body the next morning. The police believe that one of them, or both, committed the crime, but don't have enough evidence to make an arrest. Evie sends Brady packing after they return to Boston even he has doubts about her and then vanishes. The story revolves around Brady's haphazard, persistent efforts to track her down in the unpleasant little town of Cortland, Mass., where Evie used to live and the stalking began. Gossipy and provincial to begin with, Cortland has a still uglier side that's revealed as Brady delves deeper. The mystery behind Scott's death is fairly transparent, though Brady is slow, perhaps too slow, to catch on. What catalyzes the novel is Evie's secret: What has she done? And why? She's not an entirely convincing enigma, though; a woman as interesting and tough as Evie wouldn't look twice at Scott, a janitor still living with his mother much less let him intimidate her. Still, Tapply's often elegant prose is a pleasure, and fans will cheer Brady throughout. The book is from the "soft-boiled" school of mystery writing, but Brady is a pretty good egg. Author tour.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
