Broken Ground

April 2, 2018
Clifford’s depressing fourth Jay Porter novel (after 2017’s Give Up the Dead) finds Jay, a 36-year-old recovering alcoholic who suffers from panic attacks, attending an AA meeting in Ashton, N.H., where he can’t help noticing Amy Lupus, an attractive woman about his age. Jay clears estates for a living, but Amy is aware that he does investigative work on the side and asks him to locate her missing sister, Emily. Emily, a drug user, is supposed to be at the Coos County Center, a new rehab facility in town, but she left. Jay reluctantly agrees to help, knowing he’s headed for trouble because the center was built by his old enemies, brothers Adam and Michael Lombardi. Jay’s nerve is soon tested when the first person he talks to about Emily gets stabbed in the neck with a screw driver. The inconclusive ending promises that Jay’s fight with the Lombardis is far from over. Clifford breaks no new ground in this downbeat crime thriller. Agent: Elizabeth Kracht, Kimberly Cameron & Assoc.

March 15, 2018
An alcoholic estate clearer without an investigator's license agrees anyway to search for a missing addict who's anything but.Halfway through his life, Jay Porter already seems to have blown it all. An ex-insurance claims investigator, ex-drinker, and ex-husband, he's fighting to stay sober and avoid becoming an ex-father to Aiden, the 6-year-old son whose custody he lost when his marriage ended. When his high school classmate Amy Lupus emerges from the shadows of an AA meeting to ask him to look for her sister Emily, who checked out of the Coos County Center against medical advice, Porter (Give Up the Dead, 2017, etc.) doesn't think of the job as another chance at redemption, or even as a fat paycheck, but as chance to stick it to Adam and Michael Lombardi, the politically ambitious brothers who run the Coos County Center. For what it's worth, he's right about the redemption part. He has no trouble figuring out that Emily was faking her addiction in order to get access to the Lombardis' facility for an exposé she was writing under the mentorship of Paul Grogan, a reporter for the Berlin Patch. But that's where the trail ends. Grogan's no longer working for the Patch; Emily is found with her neck broken at the base of Lamentation Mountain; and the only person Porter ends up getting close to is his client, with whom he enjoys some torrid interludes before she and Dan, the heroin-using boyfriend who wants to be called Hooch, are found dead of overdoses themselves. With so many of the frail ties holding him to Earth severed, Porter's chances of exposing the nasty doings of the Lombardi brothers look slimmer than ever.The lack of surprise, suspense, and even much action makes this entry more depressing than cathartic. Give Clifford an A for alcoholic rumination, B-minus for character development, and D for plotting.

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May 1, 2018
Readers will not know which Jay Porter they prefer: the one before or the one just after he's swallowed his lorazepam. Or they may not notice any difference. Stressed or unstressed, he's the same Gloomy Gus who breakfasts on stale mixed nuts washed down with cold coffee and wonders what's wrong with people who are nice to him. We meet recovering-alcoholic Jay as he sits through AA meetings and works at his job, clearing houses whose occupants have died (he speaks of himself as a scavenger ). Here he's asked to find a young woman who checked into a rehab clinic and disappeared, but Jay discovers she wasn't an addict. So what was she doing there? Blessedly for Jay?and the reader?he stops brooding on his sour self as he becomes engrossed in the mystery and moves through the chill New Hampshire winter seeking answers and finding that the case is a sort of purifying experience. For readers who aren't depressed by the company of a depressive, there's a good detective tale here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)