Pretty Dead
by Gerry Boyle
Berkley Prime Crime, 336 pages, hardback, 2003
Jack McMorrow is the Maine stringer for the New York Times, having deliberately moved himself away from the pressures of cutting-edge journalism. However, his semi-retirement from the fray hasn't isolated him from high-profile crime cases; this is the latest addition to Gerry Boyle's series about him and his permanent other, Roxanne Masterson, a social worker.
It's through Roxanne that Jack is brought into this latest case. The daughter of powerful, wealthy (think Kennedys) David and Maddie Connelly has been reported as suffering bruises that might indicate child abuse, and Jack tags along when Roxanne goes to interview the family. They get drawn into the Connellys' social circle, meeting various of the staff of the Connellys' own foundation. A few days later, Jack goes to a crime scene and finds that the victim is Angel Moretti, a sexbomb temptress and, seemingly, manipulating cocktease whom he met during a Connelly gathering. As he tries, with Roxanne's assistance, to track down the killer he is both threatened by hoodlums and cooperated with by the Connellys.
But are the Connellys all that they seem? Are they genuinely cooperating? For all that they blame a sacked and now conveniently disappeared nanny, could it be that they were indeed responsible for those bruises? Is it possible for Jack to do his job as a reporter while at the same time doing his job as (now) a friend to make sure the Connellys are subjected to as little unjustified public attention as possible? Is there a Mob involvement? And why is Maddie Connelly – the woman who seems to have everything – seemingly so scared of her own shadow?
There are plenty of questions to be asked, and Jack sets about finding the answers – aware all the time that the killer may be closer to Roxanne and himself than he thinks.
The combination of mystery and thriller is not always easy to achieve – ratiocination and action thrills offer two different forms of excitement – but Boyle makes a very good fist of it in this novel; the final fifty pages or so are as compulsive as anything you'll find in any edge-of-your-chair thriller. There's one major "cheat" in the ratiocination aspect of the tale: I can't detail it for fear of giving away too much, but essentially Jack is seriously misinformed about something for no apparent purpose other than to mislead the reader. Aside from that, this is a good detective novel as well as well as an effective thriller.
The characterization is nicely done as well; for the most part one gets the impression one has come to know these people. (The portrayal of the victim is especially vivid.) The writing's nice without being prissy, and there are some good one-liners. Yet my enthusiasm was tempered, partly because of the "cheat" mentioned above and partly because what the novel doesn't quite succeed in capturing is atmosphere. The two principal settings are rural Maine and Boston, and certainly this reader didn't get the feel of either. That, of course, doesn't matter too much if everything else is working well; but it does render Pretty Dead less lingering than it might have been.
—Crescent Blues