By Paul Carrier
When we last saw Jack McMorrow, in the closing pages of Deadline, Gerry Boyle’s first McMorrow mystery, he was a rather miserable newspaper editor in western Maine. McMorrow had antagonized the town’s biggest employer, been kidnapped, had his apartment ransacked, narrowly escaped being shot (more than once), and failed to persuade the local cops that the drowning of the newspaper’s photographer was no accident.
Oh, and he had lost his girlfriend, who decided that he was living too dangerous a life for her taste, possibly because someone who was out to get McMorrow had threatened her as well.
So it’s not surprising that we find McMorrow has started a new life in Bloodline, the second novel in this series. Having lost his newspaper job, he has moved to Prosperity, a fictional rural enclave in quite-real Waldo County, Maine, where he’s trying to make ends meet as a freelance writer who’s living in a ramshackle rented house where he has bats for roommates. It's a far cry from his life before he moved to Maine, when he worked for The New York Times.
McMorrow has landed a magazine assignment on babies having babies in the boonies. In other words, rural teenagers giving birth to children whom they cannot support, prompting these young, unskilled mothers to either go on welfare or place their newborns up for adoption.
Despite the change in locale, employment, and romantic entanglements, McMorrow quickly learns that his life is no more simple, and no less violent, than it was before he tried to start over.
Missy Hewett, an 18-year-old college student from Prosperity who gave up her newborn daughter to avoid getting both of them stuck on welfare, is found murdered in Portland shortly after she told McMorrow she wanted his help in getting her child back.
A local teenage punk named Kenny, whom McMorrow met while trying to find teens to interview for his article, has taken a vicious dislike to him. Someone, presumably Kenny, shoots up McMorrow’s house, throws a rock through the rear window of his pickup and later sets fire to McMorrow’s truck.
And just when it seems things couldn’t get any worse, a sheriff’s deputy and a state police detective get it into their heads that McMorrow is a possible suspect in the strangulation of Hewett.
McMorrow’s preliminary contact with Hewett was so limited — a brief visit to her apartment followed by a short telephone conversation — that he really didn't know her. Yet she struck him as a gritty, determined young woman who desperately wanted to escape the hopeless small-town poverty that defined her family.
With Hewett dead, McMorrow has lost the person who would have been the focus of his article. And he’s hard-pressed to proceed at all without more information about her. Who fathered Hewett’s child? Who adopted the baby? Who arranged the adoption? (McMorrow learns that it didn’t go through the probate court.) Why did Hewett change her mind? And did Hewett’s desire to reclaim her daughter give someone connected with the adoption a motive for murder?
In addition to its turbocharged pacing, Bloodline offers up well-drawn characters and pitch-perfect dialogue. (McMorrow is a smart aleck with a penchant for mouthing off.) This suspenseful novel also features an often humorous student-teacher relationship between McMorrow and his older, wiser neighbor Clair Varney, a retired Marine and Vietnam vet with a fondness for guns, Thoreau and McMorrow, whom Varney sees as a transplanted city boy in need of some backwoods schooling.
One minor omission that irritated me while reading Deadline, the earlier novel in the series, is partially addressed this time out.
I thought the first novel should have included at least some information about McMorrow’s upbringing, to give readers a glimpse of his roots. We learn in Bloodline that he’s an only child whose parents “married late and died early.” Once they were gone, McMorrow says, “I’d been left with a feeling of being marooned. For some reason, it had become my natural state.” Perhaps that helps explain his cocky independence, and his repressed but no less real vulnerability.
Oh, and he had lost his girlfriend, who decided that he was living too dangerous a life for her taste, possibly because someone who was out to get McMorrow had threatened her as well.
So it’s not surprising that we find McMorrow has started a new life in Bloodline, the second novel in this series. Having lost his newspaper job, he has moved to Prosperity, a fictional rural enclave in quite-real Waldo County, Maine, where he’s trying to make ends meet as a freelance writer who’s living in a ramshackle rented house where he has bats for roommates. It's a far cry from his life before he moved to Maine, when he worked for The New York Times.
McMorrow has landed a magazine assignment on babies having babies in the boonies. In other words, rural teenagers giving birth to children whom they cannot support, prompting these young, unskilled mothers to either go on welfare or place their newborns up for adoption.
Despite the change in locale, employment, and romantic entanglements, McMorrow quickly learns that his life is no more simple, and no less violent, than it was before he tried to start over.
Missy Hewett, an 18-year-old college student from Prosperity who gave up her newborn daughter to avoid getting both of them stuck on welfare, is found murdered in Portland shortly after she told McMorrow she wanted his help in getting her child back.
A local teenage punk named Kenny, whom McMorrow met while trying to find teens to interview for his article, has taken a vicious dislike to him. Someone, presumably Kenny, shoots up McMorrow’s house, throws a rock through the rear window of his pickup and later sets fire to McMorrow’s truck.
And just when it seems things couldn’t get any worse, a sheriff’s deputy and a state police detective get it into their heads that McMorrow is a possible suspect in the strangulation of Hewett.
McMorrow’s preliminary contact with Hewett was so limited — a brief visit to her apartment followed by a short telephone conversation — that he really didn't know her. Yet she struck him as a gritty, determined young woman who desperately wanted to escape the hopeless small-town poverty that defined her family.
With Hewett dead, McMorrow has lost the person who would have been the focus of his article. And he’s hard-pressed to proceed at all without more information about her. Who fathered Hewett’s child? Who adopted the baby? Who arranged the adoption? (McMorrow learns that it didn’t go through the probate court.) Why did Hewett change her mind? And did Hewett’s desire to reclaim her daughter give someone connected with the adoption a motive for murder?
In addition to its turbocharged pacing, Bloodline offers up well-drawn characters and pitch-perfect dialogue. (McMorrow is a smart aleck with a penchant for mouthing off.) This suspenseful novel also features an often humorous student-teacher relationship between McMorrow and his older, wiser neighbor Clair Varney, a retired Marine and Vietnam vet with a fondness for guns, Thoreau and McMorrow, whom Varney sees as a transplanted city boy in need of some backwoods schooling.
One minor omission that irritated me while reading Deadline, the earlier novel in the series, is partially addressed this time out.
I thought the first novel should have included at least some information about McMorrow’s upbringing, to give readers a glimpse of his roots. We learn in Bloodline that he’s an only child whose parents “married late and died early.” Once they were gone, McMorrow says, “I’d been left with a feeling of being marooned. For some reason, it had become my natural state.” Perhaps that helps explain his cocky independence, and his repressed but no less real vulnerability.
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