By Paul Carrier
Jack McMorrow and Miss Tate, an assistant district attorney, are not a good match. Neither are McMorrow and the overbearing sister of abuse victim Donna Marchant. Or McMorrow and Marchant’s drunken, coked-up ex-boyfriend. Or McMorrow and Marchant's former husband. Or even McMorrow and Mr. Albert, the Maine newspaper editor who recently hired him as a reporter.
Whether it’s because of his tough talk, his dogged pursuit of the truth, or his refusal to take any guff from anybody, McMorrow just seems to rub people the wrong way. Lots of people.
A former New York Times reporter who moved to Maine once he decided he was unlikely to rise through the ranks at the Times, McMorrow tried to settle down as a weekly newspaper editor in Deadline, Gerry Boyle's first McMorrow mystery. It didn’t work out. Then he became a freelance writer in Bloodline. Another failed move. In Lifeline, the third book in the series, he has taken a part-time job at a small daily newspaper in central Maine.
True to form, things are not going well this time out either. But for every professional setback McMorrow suffers, he scores points as a dogged investigator who has a habit of stumbling upon unsolved murders.
The Kennebec Observer, which has hired McMorrow to cover courts, is a staid, unimaginative paper that is perfectly content being hand-fed by government agencies, such as the police and the DA’s office, without engaging in the pesky practice of actually interviewing real people or exposing official misconduct.
That’s not how McMorrow operates. So instead of playing stenographer and scribbling dutifully while Tate rattles off her sanitized version of court dispositions, McMorrow does some actual reporting, sitting in district court and zeroing in on Marchant’s request for a protection order to prohibit the vicious Jeff Tanner, her former boyfriend, from contacting her. McMorrow interviews Marchant and writes a vivid account of what she’s been through, further angering the already volatile Tanner and, later, Marchant’s equally unstable ex-husband Donnie as well.
Albert, the Observer’s lazy, complacent editor, hits the roof when he reads McMorrow’s story in the next day’s paper. So does Tate, who believes the Observer should get all of its court news directly from her, and only from her.
When McMorrow discovers that Tate routinely negotiates inappropriate plea deals with dangerous criminals, putting them back on the street in no time, he takes Tate on, prompting her to retaliate by arranging for Tanner to be released quickly on low bail after he gets arrested for picking a fight with McMorrow. Tanner has vowed to kill McMorrow and Marchant, so his freedom is not an encouraging turn of events.
McMorrow makes more enemies as time goes on, leaving his girlfriend Roxanne, his tough neighbor Clair, and Clair's wife Mary as his only fans.
Boyle is a former Maine newspaperman, and he does a fine job of capturing some of the trade's flavor: the sometimes devastating consequences of shoddy reporting, the blind ambition of newbies, the clashes between conscientious journalists and spineless colleagues. Not to mention the hair-pulling frustration editors experience when trying to salvage the work of sloppy reporters with poor writing skills.
“This guy doesn’t need an editor,” an editor at the Observer sputters while reading a particularly inept reporter's story. “He needs a literacy volunteer.”
McMorrow is one hard-nosed journalist. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but he’s willing to use provocative wisecracks, his fists and even a borrowed rifle to protect Marchant, or to shield Roxanne when Tanner and two of his stoned boozer buddies show up at McMorrow’s house on a very unsocial call. But when Marchant is found dead and someone writes a threatening message in blood on McMorrow’s truck, his life descends to a whole new level of horror.
As I raced through Lifeline to learn who murdered Marchant, I decided about three-quarters of the way through the novel that I knew who the killer was. That left me disappointed that Boyle had telegraphed the culprit’s identity too soon.
But Boyle knew exactly what he was doing. He laid a clever trap and I fell right into it, which meant I was dead wrong in my assumption. It’s very late in the game before the reader finally learns the truth, and the revelation is so shocking it almost took my breath away.
Whether it’s because of his tough talk, his dogged pursuit of the truth, or his refusal to take any guff from anybody, McMorrow just seems to rub people the wrong way. Lots of people.
A former New York Times reporter who moved to Maine once he decided he was unlikely to rise through the ranks at the Times, McMorrow tried to settle down as a weekly newspaper editor in Deadline, Gerry Boyle's first McMorrow mystery. It didn’t work out. Then he became a freelance writer in Bloodline. Another failed move. In Lifeline, the third book in the series, he has taken a part-time job at a small daily newspaper in central Maine.
True to form, things are not going well this time out either. But for every professional setback McMorrow suffers, he scores points as a dogged investigator who has a habit of stumbling upon unsolved murders.
The Kennebec Observer, which has hired McMorrow to cover courts, is a staid, unimaginative paper that is perfectly content being hand-fed by government agencies, such as the police and the DA’s office, without engaging in the pesky practice of actually interviewing real people or exposing official misconduct.
That’s not how McMorrow operates. So instead of playing stenographer and scribbling dutifully while Tate rattles off her sanitized version of court dispositions, McMorrow does some actual reporting, sitting in district court and zeroing in on Marchant’s request for a protection order to prohibit the vicious Jeff Tanner, her former boyfriend, from contacting her. McMorrow interviews Marchant and writes a vivid account of what she’s been through, further angering the already volatile Tanner and, later, Marchant’s equally unstable ex-husband Donnie as well.
Albert, the Observer’s lazy, complacent editor, hits the roof when he reads McMorrow’s story in the next day’s paper. So does Tate, who believes the Observer should get all of its court news directly from her, and only from her.
When McMorrow discovers that Tate routinely negotiates inappropriate plea deals with dangerous criminals, putting them back on the street in no time, he takes Tate on, prompting her to retaliate by arranging for Tanner to be released quickly on low bail after he gets arrested for picking a fight with McMorrow. Tanner has vowed to kill McMorrow and Marchant, so his freedom is not an encouraging turn of events.
McMorrow makes more enemies as time goes on, leaving his girlfriend Roxanne, his tough neighbor Clair, and Clair's wife Mary as his only fans.
Boyle is a former Maine newspaperman, and he does a fine job of capturing some of the trade's flavor: the sometimes devastating consequences of shoddy reporting, the blind ambition of newbies, the clashes between conscientious journalists and spineless colleagues. Not to mention the hair-pulling frustration editors experience when trying to salvage the work of sloppy reporters with poor writing skills.
“This guy doesn’t need an editor,” an editor at the Observer sputters while reading a particularly inept reporter's story. “He needs a literacy volunteer.”
McMorrow is one hard-nosed journalist. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but he’s willing to use provocative wisecracks, his fists and even a borrowed rifle to protect Marchant, or to shield Roxanne when Tanner and two of his stoned boozer buddies show up at McMorrow’s house on a very unsocial call. But when Marchant is found dead and someone writes a threatening message in blood on McMorrow’s truck, his life descends to a whole new level of horror.
As I raced through Lifeline to learn who murdered Marchant, I decided about three-quarters of the way through the novel that I knew who the killer was. That left me disappointed that Boyle had telegraphed the culprit’s identity too soon.
But Boyle knew exactly what he was doing. He laid a clever trap and I fell right into it, which meant I was dead wrong in my assumption. It’s very late in the game before the reader finally learns the truth, and the revelation is so shocking it almost took my breath away.
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