Hurt Machine is the seventh in Reed
Farrel Coleman's Moe Prager detective series, and given the opening in which
the sixty plus Prager announces just after a pre-wedding party for his daughter
that he has been diagnosed with cancer, it may well turn out to be the
last. Bur when his ex-wife and partner
turns up at the party and asks him to look into the murder of her estranged
sister, an EMT who had been disgraced after she and her partner refused to aid
a dying restaurant worker, Prager is embroiled in a complicated chain of events
that has him dealing with her colleagues in the fire department angry that she
has given them a bad name, reluctant witnesses and old friends eager to help
with his investigation as he tries to find her killer. There are a lot of discoveries to be made,
and just when you think you've come to the truth, there's something else to
discover. Coleman is very good at
keeping readers guessing.
Set mostly in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Coleman is almost as
adept at creating a sense of place as a master like George Pelecanos is with
Washington,DC. Brooklyn especially
almost functions as a character itself.
Whether he is talking about the boardwalk at Coney Island or the newly
upscale Park Slope, the Belt Parkway or Stillwell Avenue, stickball or
ring-a-levio, this is as realistic a portrait of Brooklyn as you are likely to
come across. He knows the finer points of Nathan's French fries and the
subtleties of Brooklyn pizza. He knows
the bars where the firemen drink and those that cater to the ordinary
locals. If writers are able to stake a
claim to a locale, Coleman has a good case for making Brooklyn his own.
Grown old and sick, Prager is no rough guy private eye. He is as likely to collapse from too much to
eat and drink as he is from fighting with some younger tough. There are women, but his current girl friend
is in Vermont and the young beauties he comes across in his investigations call
him grandpa. Still, if he is not now
what he has been, the years have brought him what the poet calls the
philosophic mind. He has a knack for
putting his insights about the human condition and life in general in pithy,
almost epigrammatic, tidbits of wisdom.
"It is the great folly of humanity, the search for self- knowledge
and significance." "Time to
think is life's Petri dish." "Only in retrospect is life a simple
series of easily connected dots."
The book is filled with this sort of philosophizing.
Nonetheless, Prager is committed to finding the truth. It is almost as if he is looking for one last
moment of action before what might be the end.
Like Tennyson's "Ulysses," it's not too late to seek a newer
world. He is dogged in his pursuit of the
murderer, what he has lost in physical power, he makes up for with the street
smarts he has gained over the years.
Still he is old, and there is always a question about how he will hold
up and whether he is equal to the task.
The problem I have coming to a book like Hurt
Machine without having read any of the others in the series is all
the references to people and events that seem to have been treated in the
earlier novels. I have the feeling that
everything would be more meaningful to me if I understood more about the
relationship between Prager and his ex, if I knew more about Nathan Martyr who
turns up as a restaurant owner late in the investigation, or if I knew what
happened to Prager's first wife. While I
am bothered by not knowing as much about such things and many others, it is
worth noting that the Hurt Machine is quite good enough to
make me want to read the first six to find out what I've been missing.
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