Booked to Die (John Dunning)

The Plot
Cliff Janeway is a Denver detective with a weakness for book collecting. He likes to read, too, though that’s not a given. The year is 1986 and eBay and the internet have not yet transformed the antiquarian book market into something completely unrecognizable from its previous incarnation. A book scout — a person who makes the rounds of yard sales and thrift stores in search of underpriced used books — is murdered, and Janeway finds himself oddly determined to find out who was responsible. The path he takes to the answer puts his career and even his life in danger.

My Thoughts
This was not a mystery series I had ever heard of until it was suggested for one of our reviews. I suspect it was the alleged subject matter — the book trade — which was the attraction. And I freely admit, had I found this on my own, I might well have been tempted to pick it up.

And it succeeded in one goal at least: I was able to finish the book. In spite of my near obsessive need to finish things like books, there have been quite a few mysteries that I’ve picked up off the shelf at the library due to an interesting cover blurb which later proved to be entirely unreadable for a variety of reasons. (Off the top of my head, the recent failures include The Rabbit Factory, Southern Fatality and Consigned to Death.)

The story centers around one Cliff Janeway, who seems to be writing or telling this tale from some unspecified point in the future. At the time described at the beginning of the story, he is a police detective who has been having some problems with a wealthy scumbag to whom no charges will stick. He’s also involved with another police officer, Carol, supposedly to the point of considering marriage with her. But it’s telling that the author lavishes far more time and effort in detailing Janeway’s feelings and emotions toward the scumbag than his relationship with his girlfriend. She remains a non-entity and pretty soon they randomly break up and she disappears from the narrative altogether. Janeway, in fact, is really a loner in spite of a superficial effort (purposely superficial? It’s unclear) made to give him connections and friends and other contacts. And honestly, loners can be hard to make interesting.

The mystery itself doesn’t really ramp up until the second half of the book. The first half, though the mystery is presented on the very first pages and there is some desultory detective work put in, is totally there to explain how Janeway came to leave the police force and enter the book trade. I would have liked to have seen this fact a bit more well camoflaged, because as it stands, there’s a very clear break in the middle of the book where this tale ends and then suddenly the real detective work begins.

I also found some of the writing and characterization to be sloppy. In the middle of the book especially, Janeway starts to make sweeping statements about the passage of time which makes it seem as if years have passed. But then when we move in to the second half of the book, it’s clear that this is taking place just a few months after the first section. So where did those statements come from? Is he narrating this from a time far in the future? This could be made more clear. As it was I spent several minutes flipping back and forth trying to figure out how it could work that there wouldn’t be a contradiction.

And then the characterization. Janeway was all right; by the end of the book I did feel like he was starting to take shape, if a still nebulous one. But the secondary characters were very vague, and many of them (like his police detective partner) never made it past cardboard cutout. I also felt cheated — one expects to lose secondary characters in a mystery, that’s a danger of the role, but if you spend the first half of the book tearing apart the character’s life, you tend to expect that when he finally begins to rebuild it that you’re going to start meeting the characters who will people the series from here on out. This is obviously not the case here, as by the end of the book there’s perhaps only two people other than Janeway who seem likely to return in any future stories.

The mystery itself was pretty weak. The author dropped enough hints about who the culprit was that he might has well have erected a sign. That he managed to spin it out over half the book was impressive; it just wasn’t complicated enough to go on longer than that, so it’s a good thing there was all that other stuff to occupy the other half.

In Short
This was an okay, but not stellar mystery book. It was made more interesting to me by its description of the used book trade of two decades ago. The author could have done more to tie the two halves of the book together, and there were some sloppy phrases that made the timeline of events confusing to me. The secondary characters were also pretty weakly drawn in several cases, with little to make them memorable in any way. I probably won’t be continuing with this series, though I may check out the jacket summaries just in case.