Customer Reviews

What Goes Around Comes Around: A Mystery Novel Featuring Bartender Brian McNulty (Bartender Brian McNulty Mysteries)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the first book I've read by Con Lehane even though it's the second one in the Brian McNulty series. In this story, I find a naïve and trusting bartender who keeps up with his friends over the years. Sadly, his friends' lives are not very straight, and bartender Brian gets involved in an intrigue about which he has no knowledge. There are some murders and unanswered questions. The reader is pulled along with this quasi-hero to try to figure out what is happening. Brian is quite a likable fellow. He takes everything in stride with countless dry quips about his and his friends' situations. His sense of humor is enchanting.

The story flows along well until Brian's one specific encounter with a woman named Sandra. I don't like that interlude and feel it adds nothing to the story. However, the fun of reading this book and discovering what is happening to Brian's friends makes for an overall enjoyable read. As the ending of the book nears, the story becomes more gripping and simply doesn't let up until all of the unexplained pieces of McNulty's puzzle fall into place. This is a very good book. I would definitely like to read other books about bartender Brian, preferably starting with the first of Lehane's series.

Brian McNulty would like to be an actor, but since no jobs ever come his way he has settled on being a bartender in New York City. Brian's laid-back life suddenly takes a turn when some old friends from his Atlantic City days, Big John Wolinski and Greg Phillips, come calling. They want him to start working at the upscale Ocean Club, but on his first night there, the body of another old acquaintance is found in the water off the pier, and Greg goes missing. Brian decides the best way to find Greg is to look in their old Atlantic City haunts, so he returns to his old stomping grounds and begins overturning the rocks of his past. Instead of answers, however, he seems to only turn up more mysteries, plus he's got guys trying to kill him and winds up tangling with some Chilean revolutionaries. By the time it's all said and done, Brian realizes almost nothing in his life is as it once seemed, and it seems some of the people he knows he never really knew at all.

I really wanted to like this book, but couldn't quite manage it. I simply couldn't care about any of the characters. Low-level hoods and second-rate bartenders just aren't all that interesting. I'm not exactly fascinated by a guy whose golden moment consists of pouring the perfect drink and handing it off to a chesty female customer. Plus, the plot went nowhere. Everything of any import that happened occurred before the story got rolling, and the entire book consisted of Brian's ruminations and speculation about days gone by in the distant past. Yet, no matter how much he thought about everything, he never seemed to come any closer to figuring out what was going on. Nobody he questioned ever gave him any useful information. Then suddenly, at the end, he managed to put all the pieces together. Unfortunately, the conclusion was just as sloppy and contrived as the rest of the novel, and it felt like the author pulled the villain out of a hat. Several things also fell out of place at the last minute for our intrepid hero, which just left me with a vague feeling of relief that the book was finally over and I could get away from him. Brian McNulty's bartending adventures will have to continue without me.

Con Lehane writes about trade union troubles in New York City with authority. He's been a union organizer and knows his subject. His lead character, Brian McNulty, is a product of Atlantic City, New Jersey --- the son of a union man who fought his battles in the name of the commoner, as a Communist. McNulty's past will not release its grip on him when he finds himself at war with his own Bartenders Union. He's back on the job after a six-month hiatus when he serves a customer from the far regions of his childhood in Jersey. Big John Wolinski turns out to be the regional manager for the Sheraton chain.

A second childhood memory emerges in the voice of Greg Phillips, who contacts Big John on the bar phone. He's asking for advice. Greg is the barkeep who trained McNulty in the trade and now works for Big John at the Ocean Club in Manhattan. Big John has made it big in the business world but looks to the needs of old friends when they call. Arriving, Greg takes Big John aside and confides that he has come to the Sheraton to fire his old friend over McNulty's union troubles. Instead, he offers Brian a job as bar manager at the Ocean Club in Manhattan, a short-term solution. Greg is there, under the thumb of club manager Aaron Adams.

On McNulty's first night, he's drawn to the pier by a loud commotion near the giant yachts docked there. Near its hull, the water beside the most gleaming boat slops against a body, that of a man in a tuxedo. The victim, knifed and dumped in the water, is identified as Aaron Adams. Later, Greg fails to show up for his shift.

Lehane depicts his characters well. Personalities jump from the page and become believable links to a past neighborhood where little boys had tough knowledge well beyond their years, learning to survive enough to leave it. Some carried their past transgressions as baggage into adulthood, while others left them behind, only to discover dusty memories soil them. WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND is an education to the inner core of sordid experiences. One can sense the smells and sounds of McNulty's neighborhood when he returns to uncover meaning in the events of his today.

The book has action --- gunshot wounds, erratic taxicab chases, numerous drinks at many bars, jailhouse drama, murder, rediscovery of a past romance, and advice from an old Communist reprobate. If a reader's preference leans to a problem-solving series featuring a bartender-sleuth, WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND will make one thirsty for the third book in this fine series.

--- Reviewed by Judy Gigstad

Once again bartender Brian McNulty, as he was in Beware the Solitary Drinker, is surrounded by a bizarre group of sleazy weirdos, this time as he searches for a friend who has disappeared under suspicious circumstances possibly connected with a body floating in the East River near Brian's tony new supper club. As the scene moves through Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the Jersey shore, running up against Serbians, West Africans and Chileans, among others, Brian, who doesn't strike one as particularly brave, proves to be extremely tenacious.
Some of Lehane's characters are quite memorable, especially "Big John" Wolinsky, the boy from the wrong side of the tracks who has, through hard work and a generally winning personality and the ability to instill loyalty in his friends, has risen far.
And Brian is funny. Or Lehane is funny. "Humorous" mystery writers generally don't make me laugh, but Lehane certainly does. You keep waiting for McNulty to fall down an open manhole, but though he has various misadventures, falls down several times, and sometimes descends into farce, he avoids that.
Yet there is a certain profound moralism here that reaches back to Raymond Chandler (who never was funny, even in his "comic" short story). McNulty is a middle-aged man, a frustrated actor for whom nothing really has turned out the way he hoped, but who still hopes, while knowing it will never happen, for a moral order to be restored. He is in for some rude surprises in this fine book.

... but almost everybody else is suspect.
This is a great book to curl up with and savor. I was always dying to know what happened next, but each character and every event is described so vividly and interestingly that I didn't want to rush through the pages. Caution: Highly addictive!

Brian McNulty is a bartender at Manhattan's Midtown Sheraton when an old friend Big John Wolinsky, a regional Sheraton manager, arrives in town ostensibly to fire his crony. The third member of the "three musketeers" Greg Phillips arrives at the bar. Greg is surprised to learn Brian works there, but says nothing further except he sounds in trouble. Big John says he has no plans to give the pink slip to his buddy, but his friends clearly have designs to use him because they went through a murderous lot together over a dozen years ago in Atlantic City at the Dockside before each one quit. Big John reassigns Brian to serve as the bar manger at the Ocean Club.

On his first day at the club, a body in a tux is floating in the East River. Detective Sergeant Sheehan leads the investigation, but immediately assumes that Brian is lying and involved. Brian is involved though he has no idea why as he is threatened and shot at; worse he thinks Big John knows, but is not talking.

This satirical New York who-done-it is fun to read due to the amusing asides and soliloquies provided by a somewhat overwhelmed Brian as he learns a life lesson that unless one remains a solitary drinker, WHAT GOES AROUND COMES AROUND. Trying to help his pals especially Big John, Brian becomes the target though he has no idea why, what he is doing, or wants to silent him. Though his involvement with no help from his friends comes across after a while as watered down gin, fans of mirthful Manhattan murder mysteries will appreciate his wisecracking investigative style.

Harriet Klausner