Hurt Machine

Starred review from September 19, 2011
Razor-edged contemporary whodunits don’t get much better than Shamus-winner Coleman’s seventh Moe Prager mystery (after 2010’s Innocent Monster). Shortly after the Brooklyn PI learns that he has stomach cancer, Carmella Melendez, his ex-wife, asks him to look into the stabbing murder of her estranged sister, Alta Conseco. Two months before her demise, Conseco and a fellow EMT, Maya Watson, became the subject of international outrage after failing while off-duty to help Robert Tillman, a cook who suffered a fatal stroke at a Manhattan bistro. Prager pursues the obvious course of seeking a link between Conseco’s and Tillman’s deaths. Watson has become an uncommunicative recluse, who provides little help, but the owner of the
restaurant near where Conseco died is an old friend and an ex-cop, happy to help in any way he can. Logical and surprising plot twists combine with Prager’s world-weary narrative voice to produce another winner.

December 1, 2011

Facing his own mortality when cancer strikes, hardheaded Moe Prager (Innocent Monster) agrees to help his ex-wife once again. What's the real story behind the murder of her sister, an FDNY emergency medical technician, and why is Moe the only one investigating?

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2011
Moe Prager is facing surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation for stomach cancer, and the oncologist has euphemistically suggested he get his house in order. Ever the realist, Moe wonders how a man who can't organize his sock drawer can organize his future and past. For starters, Moe opts for silence, at least until after his daughter's wedding three weeks hence. But his ex-wife asks him to look into the murder of her estranged sister, a New York EMT who became a city-wide pariah for refusing to aid a man stricken by an aneurysm. So, with a gnawing, growing pain in his gut, the sixtysomething former cop and former PI begins to ask questions. No one wants to answer, and many tell him the murder was karmic justice. But as always, Moe abides, and crime lovers will get grimly fascinating looks into the mind of a man facing a slow motion death, the clannish world of New York firefighters (EMTs are part of FDNY), and louche, tribal Brooklyn. Moe's fans will be rocked by his diagnosis, but like Moe, they too will abide.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)