Book Reviews by Elizabeth A. White

Characters, and issues of character, abound in the latest offering from author Lynn Kostoff, Late Rain. The sleepy, second tier resort town of Magnolia Beach, South Carolina wouldn’t seem to be the ideal setting for a drama of Shakespearean proportions, yet that is precisely what Kostoff delivers.

Corrine Tedros, unhappy with her husband’s lack of a sense of urgency in persuading his uncle, Stanley, to sell his highly profitable soft drink empire, decides to speed the process along…by hiring a hitman to take Stanley out of the picture.

Unfortunately for her, things don’t go quite as planned. First, the hitman strays from the carefully arranged script, leaving Corrine with a shaky alibi during the time of the killing. Second, Jack Carson, an elderly man suffering from Alzheimer’s, happens to witness the murder. Third, Officer Ben Decovic, a displaced Ohio homicide detective with something to prove, latches on to the case.

With that setup, Late Rain sounds like a straightforward crime story, right? Not so fast.

From the outset it quickly becomes apparent that the cast of Late Rain is a highly complicated bunch, each driven by their unique demons and desires. As the story is told in turns from several different characters’ perspectives, the reader is presented with an ever changing picture of the events as they unfold, never quite sure if what’s being relayed is the truth or a distorted version of it as seen through the prism of the characters’ personal motives.

Corrine, of course, is motivated by her desire to gain control of the company and, later, to get free from the very tangled web she’s helped weave. She also has a mysterious past, which is catching up with her at precisely the wrong time. Ben is trying to get his confidence as an investigator back after a killer’s random murder spree took the lives of five people, including his wife. In the wake of the tragedy Ben found that he had “lost his eye” for ferreting out criminals. He no longer trusted his instincts, so he resigned his position as a homicide detective in Ohio and moved to Magnolia Beach. His casual encounter with Corrine during the early stages of the investigation reignites those instincts; he just knows something’s not right with Corrine, and he’s determined to prove it. (more…)

If you want to play God, be a writer. That’s what I’ve told writing students for years. Because, when you think about it, the blank page allows you to create or recreate the universe in any way your imagination so chooses. Even if you opt to work within established parameters, the framework of a cozy, let’s say, or a PI novel, what happens within those boundaries is still completely up to the author.

A brilliant example of this is Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, With Occasional Music (brilliant title, as well). Pretty much in the form of a classic hard-boiled detective novel—something I know a little bit about—Lethem’s book features super-evolved animals like gun-toting kangaroos. He does this and he makes it work. And that’s the trick of it. Sure, you can create any universe you want, but the challenge is making it work for the reader.

While the Moe Prager novels don’t feature gun-toting kangaroos, that doesn’t mean I didn’t make some serious choices when I started down this road. I knew the Brooklyn neighborhood of Coney Island would be the central allegorical feature of the novels. It would be Moe’s touchstone. I was weary of the morose, hard-drinking, hard-hitting, quick-on-the-draw, white loner PI. That character had been done to death. And no matter what I would do, I wasn’t going to better the masters of that character. So I chose instead to make my PI Jewish, happily married, a father, a drinker, but not a drunk. He would have a stable source of income. But the best choice I made was to have Moe Prager age in real time as the years go by. (more…)