Hurt Machine is the seventh in Reed Farrel Coleman's Moe Prager detective series, and given the opening, in which the 60- plus Prager announces just after a pre-wedding party for his daughter that he has been diagnosed with cancer, it may well turn out to be the last.
But when his ex-wife and partner turns up at the party and asks him to look into the murder of her estranged sister, an emergency medical technician who has been disgraced after she and her partner refused to aid a dying restaurant worker, Prager is embroiled in a complicated chain of events that has him dealing with her colleagues in the fire department angry that she has given them a bad name, reluctant witnesses and old friends eager to help with his investigation as he tries to find her killer.
There are a lot of discoveries to be made, and just when you think you've come to the truth, there's something else to discover. Coleman is very good at keeping readers guessing.
Set mostly in Brooklyn and Manhattan, Coleman is almost as adept at creating a sense of place as a master like George Pelecanos is with Washington DC. Brooklyn especially almost functions as a character itself. Whether he is talking about the boardwalk at Coney Island or the newly upscale Park Slope, the Belt Parkway or Stillwell Avenue, stickball or ring-a-levio, this is as realistic a portrait of Brooklyn as you are likely to come across.
Coleman knows the finer points of Nathan's French fries and the subtleties of Brooklyn pizza. He knows the bars where the firemen drink and those that cater to the ordinary locals. If writers are able to stake a claim to a locale, Coleman has a good case for making Brooklyn his own.
Grown old and sick, Prager is no rough guy private eye. He is as likely to collapse from too much to eat and drink as he is from fighting with some younger tough. There are women, but his current girl friend is in Vermont and the young beauties he comes across in his investigations call him grandpa.
Article comments
1 - Mack
I hadn't read any of the previous Moe Prager books before Hurt Machine either but I think Coleman did a good job giving the new reader clues as to what came before. Like you, it makes me want to read the previous six novels. It is a terrific story and I particularly liked the way the author has Prager reflect back on his life. Maybe it's because Moe and I are about the same age.