The Mind Box
by A.J. Diehl
Midnight Ink, 472 pages, paperback, 2005
Hollywood detective Lane (Helena) Daily is called in to lead the investigation into the horrific murder of movie and music producer Eddie Ealing, whose corpse has been found grotesquely mutilated in the style of his screen gorefest Sense of Life. Could this be the first killing by a serial murderer with a bizarre sense of humor and a chip on his shoulder about cleaning up the entertainment industry? That's Hollywood's first assumption, an assumption shared by many of Daily's colleagues, but she's not so sure – especially when there's evidence that her investigation is being quietly hobbled by powerful movers and shakers.
Not long before the murder, Ealing received by e-mail a sadistic display showing a human heart and a young woman's blood-smeared face. The sender was Mike's Gifts, a shadowy organization – or individual – whom Daily discovers has a long history of, for a fee, exacting physically harmless but psychologically sadistic revenge upon the bullying and corrupt. Could this "gift" be linked to the murder? Does she need to solve the mystery of Mike's Gifts before she can solve the mystery of Ealing's death?
Or is the answer to be found in the too-squeaky-clean memory-research establishment, the Temperel Institute, run by the Ealing family and centred on the dead man's eccentric-genius brother? And where does the Ealing paterfamilias, a hyper-rich professional moralist, fit in?
All of the above, while an accurate summation of the scenario, makes A.J. Diehl's first novel, The Mind Box, sound like just another template mystery.
It's not.
To amplify that statement would probably be to give away too many of the surprises to be found during the course of reading this long, richly textured and very rewarding book. Suffice it to say that it's one of those wonderful novels where you end up a very long way from where you expected to find yourself.
The Mind Box is not a perfect novel. The first sixty or eighty of its 470+ pages have a certain aura of uncertainty about them; I was reminded of one of those small-press authors who have all the talent in the world but desperately need a good editor. In particular, the author seems keen to cram in as much as possible of her research on police procedure, forensics and the like. But thereafter, almost between one page and the next, the narrative picks itself up and starts zipping along compellingly. Daily, who in the initial pages seems set to be a by-the-numbers modern-mystery-novel female cop sleuth, becomes instead a fully rounded and very simpatico personality, as does her friend and shrink, television psychiatrist Paulette Sohl. Minor characters become fully fleshed out, including Daily's cop ex-husband and especially one of the other characters, whose identity I'd better not reveal here but whose importance becomes increasingly evident as the tale progresses.
A.J. Diehl is definitely a writer to watch. The Mind Box is a complex and highly satisfying novel, and an impressive debut to the genre.
—Crescent Blues