And Leave Her Lay Dying

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Readers of The Man Who Murdered God, a taut psychological thriller that
introduced the street-wise, short-fused, and belligerent homicide
detective Joe McGuire, may not be surprised that the Boston cop begins
this second novel leaping from a witness stand to assault the lawyer of
an alleged murderer. After this perhaps implausible incident,
McGuire’s superiors thrust him into quasi-limbo, checking files of
unsolved homicides. Naturally, he finds unfollowed leads in one
investigation, and with the deductive help of his ex-partner he begins
his search for a killer. The tale may fall a bit short of the
page-turning suspense of Reynolds’s first novel, but it is mostly
entertaining and satisfactory. One possible exception to the even tone
of the novel is a four-chapter diversion that takes McGuire to sleaze
and bloody violence on the Texas-Mexico border. Here the procedural
genre is abandoned for a combination of Wild West shootouts and Dirty
Harry methods. (McGuire contemplates “the weakness of the spoken
word” and opts for “the purity of physical violence.”) Colorful
this is, but it seems out of place in what is otherwise a perceptive
tale of a big-city murder investigation.