The Good Detective

January 15, 2019
Southern gothic mingles with modern noir in this well-intentioned mashup.P.T. Marsh, a sergeant in the Mason Falls, Georgia, police department, has lost his way. After the deaths of his wife and son he has fallen into depression, drinking his way through his days, no longer Mason Falls' best detective. Late one night he tries to help Crimson, a strip club performer, whose partner, Virgil Rowe, abuses her, but he soon finds himself in more complicated trouble. He beats and threatens Rowe, goes home, and wakes up to find Rowe has been murdered. Has Marsh killed him? He doesn't know, but things get really sticky when Rowe becomes the most likely suspect in another murder that had taken place earlier that evening. The victim in that earlier death was a black teenager who was tortured and lynched. Following up on the racist murder leads Marsh to a white supremacist group and then further into history, revealing a pattern of deaths that reach back to the "old" South and exposing a shadowy cabal still in operation today. Historic documents contain the names of families still powerful in Georgia and hint at horrifying rituals. Marsh, who believes he can genuinely number himself among the unprejudiced white people--he has an African-American partner and his wife was also African-American--becomes again a "good detective" in opposing this powerful form of racism. Marsh is a likable character, but he has too much to do here: solve Rowe's murder to exonerate himself; rehabilitate himself and his reputation on the force; and expose and then fight the cabal. And while the persistence of racism is undeniable, the shape it takes in this novel is so sensationalized it may distract from the more pedestrian and pressing forms that are always around us.A promising start, but McMahon could do more with less.

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Starred review from January 1, 2019
P. T. Marsh, of Mason Falls, Georgia, was a good detective?at least until his wife and son died in a car accident less than a year before, leading him to drink too much and make bad decisions, one of which is to teach the abusive boyfriend of a hooker a lesson. So he beats Virgil Rowe one night, only to be called to Rowe's murder scene the next morning, leaving him unsure about whether he, in a drunken stupor, might have killed the man himself. It gets worse when Marsh and his partner, Remy Morgan, a strong young black woman, find the partially burned body of black, 15-year-old Kendrick Webster with a noose around his neck in a torched farmer's field. Suspicion points to white-supremacist Rowe as responsible. But arson-murder seems to Marsh an unlikely combination, even with the racial overtones (not publicly revealed) of Kendrick's death. Marsh, however, looks for similar crimes in the area and uncovers something even worse than a serial killer, presenting him with the dilemma of how to achieve justice. This unusually accomplished debut is the first in a projected series; with Marsh still having demons to deal with, the table is set for much more compelling, character-centric stories to come. Crime-fiction fans are advised to get in at the start.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)