Another Elderly Detective

Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Fiction

I’ve written about Stuart Kaminsky’s Chicago police detective Abe Lieberman, but there’s another elderly detective closer to home, Ronald Tierney’s Deets Shanahan. The seventy-year-old Indianapolis p.i.’s latest appearance is in Bloody Palms. I just read that one, and then I just had to go pick up the couple that I had missed before it.

In Bloody Palms, Shanahan gets a call to come to Mexico for a meeting with his old army major, Jack Wenders. It’s been since Korea, so Shanahan is a bit surprised to hear from him. Wenders, it turns out, wants Shanahan’s help to deal with an international conspiracy. Which would seem a little over the top, except that the next day Wenders is murdered.

Meanwhile, back in Indiana, Shanahan’s younger fellow p.i. and friend Howie Cross suddenly has a case to investigate, too. His mother wakes him to tell him that his daughter, Maya, has disappeared from their farmhouse.

Maya’s mother, Margot, who dropped the little girl on Cross’s doorstep a while back, has been known to behave erratically, so it’s possible that Maya is safe with her. But Cross, loner though he is, can’t help but panic at the thought that Maya may be in danger—and Margot may be, too.

Both cases are eventually solved, of course, as any mystery reader would expect. What makes the book enjoyable is the deceptively slow, casual way that Tierney goes about unspinning his plot. Also his pair of rumpled heroes, both of whom seem as though they’d be more at home propping up a bar stool than running down bad guys. (In fact, Shanahan spent a long time propping up barstools, till he lucked out and met his live-in lover, Maureen; while Cross still doesn’t get out of bed before noon.)

I’m still backtracking on the previous volumes, Glass Chameleon and Asphalt Moon, but I recommend you begin at the beginning with The Stone Veil.