Running from the Dead

Starred review from May 1, 2020
Knowles, the author of the Wilson series (Never Play Another Man's Game, 2012) and several fine stand-alones, including Tin Men (2018), here tells the story of a private eye, Sam Jones, in desperate need of personal and professional redemption. His multiyear search for a missing boy ended in tragedy. Can a new case, involving another missing child, have a different, happier conclusion? Canadian novelist Knowles is a strong writer, with a real sense of what makes bad people tick and what makes good people risk their lives to catch the bad ones. His prose style is top-notch, too?lean, hard-edged, and brutally honest when it needs to be. As stories of redemption go, this one is particularly interesting, mostly because it does not follow the typical story arc: an argument could be made, in fact, that Jones is even more down-and-out at the end of the story than he was at the beginning, but?and this may be Knowles' main point?perhaps being down-and-out, like recognizing beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. A must-read crime novel from a writer who deserves to be on the radar screens of a lot more genre readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)