An Exaggerated Murder

March 9, 2015
The spectre of Pynchon looms over this entertaining novel. Trike Augustine is the classic Holmesian "smartest man in the room" detective, complete with ego and abrasive personality. His assistantsâLola, a gorgeous artist with a gift for data analysis, and Max, a former FBI agentâtolerate his quirks, but the police (about whom Trike says, "They suck and I hate them") are less patient with him. His new case, in which a man named Joyce (complete with Ulysses-themed house) appears to have staged his own kidnapping for no apparent gain, is filled with baffling clues and nonsensical red herrings. Thousands of dollars are spent hiding basic office supplies; circus equipment is tucked away in the sewers; library books get replaced with blank notebooks. Cook occasionally has trouble getting the zaniness and the hardboiled tone to gel, throwing in extended rants on the origins of hockey goons, a deconstruction of Polanski's Chinatown (complete with spoiler warning), and a series of Trike's internal dialogues on each of Joyce's facial features. Nevertheless, he makes the kitchen-sink approach work more often than not.

Starred review from February 1, 2015
Three things to keep in mind about this book: Travel is far more enriching than arrival, detectives are essentially professional critics, and always be very careful when you decide to quit smoking.Trident "Trike" Augustine is a very American, excruciatingly dysfunctional variant of the "consulting investigator" who's been outsmarting criminals and out-thinking authority figures since the Victorian era. Yet even though this hip, dissolute Sherlock has managed to put away whole armies of fiends, thieves, psychos and grifters, Trike's teeming brain has hit an immobilizing speed bump: the disappearance of a reclusive billionaire named Joyce. The only substantial clues are a large pool of blood and a secret compartment within Joyce's mansion that the feds unaccountably seal off from further scrutiny by either Trike or the local cops. (By the way, it's not clear, or particularly important, what city this is, though Cook, a first-time novelist, sells books in the Greater Boston region.) Trike can't help but use such impediments as an excuse for pressing his inquiry. But the deeper he looks, the more confounded he becomes. There is, for instance, the matter of the dead pig that somehow shows up on Trike's apartment floor in the dark of night, doing nothing but bleeding on his rug. The best, if tentative, conclusion that Trike and his two Watsons, a sassy painter named Lola and a circumspect ex-FBI agent named Max, can reach about the pig is that it's one of several crass warnings to stay off the Joyce case. Which, this being a detective story, has the opposite effect on Trike. But the only thing that becomes clear about the novel's plot is that it's somewhat less and considerably more than an average detective story. Rather, it's a sustained inquiry into the nature of detecting itself-and into the process of writing. Keep in mind the millionaire's name and the book's quicksilver references to Ulysses-and to Edgar Allan Poe's genre-defining mystery tale "The Purloined Letter." Such literary gamesmanship may exasperate the traditional mystery lover, but the writing throughout is so crystalline, the dialogue so acerbically funny and the characters so engaging as to make the pages seem as though they're turning themselves. A beautifully written postmodern novel of deduction that merrily, wittily blows up its genre's conventions while at the same time re-energizing possibilities for the 21st-century detective story.

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March 1, 2015

Trike Augustine rubs most everyone the wrong way. His only saving grace is his impressive brain, one that rivals that of Sherlock Holmes--and Trike has Holmes's prickly attitude and total lack of social niceties to boot. Along with artist sidekick Lola and laconic ex-FBI agent Max, Trike runs a semisuccessful private eye business. He can always solve the investigation but coming up with next month's rent is sometimes tricky. When reclusive billionaire Mr. Joyce vanishes from his home, leaving only a conspicuously large bloodstain behind, Trike takes the case, motivated by the generous reward that gets smaller every day Joyce remains missing. Though he prides himself on being one step ahead of, well, everyone, even Trike's not prepared for how this case unfolds. VERDICT While Trike's obsession sometimes lapses into annoying parody--there are definite shades of Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes here--bookseller and debut novelist Cook's humorous take on various whodunit and noir tropes is mainly spot-on.

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