Author Robert Greer started out mining the field of black private investigators with his series hero C. J. Floyd. Floyd is a hybrid, part bail bondsman and part antiques dealer (though he’s since given up the bail bonds business and bountyhunting).
Comparisons were immediately made to Walter Mosely’s long-running unlicensed private eye, Easy Rawlins. Easy’s adventures to date have gone from 1948 to 1968 and seem to have locked into the late 1960s. Floyd is contemporary, but the focus of his investigations seem to mix current crimes with past events of a historical nature. On the surface, there might be some resemblance between the two series, but there are vast differences.
The early Floyd adventures concentrated on the bail bonds business and moved quickly into murder investigations. The last three novels have their foundations anchored more deeply in Floyd’s interest in the antiques business and conspiracy theories. As a result, Greer’s already complex plots have deepened even more, with mixed results.
In The Mongoose Deception, Greer put Floyd directly in the path of a conspiracy cover-up involving the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The body of Antoine Ducane is discovered in the Eisenhower Memorial Tunnel in Colorado, Floyd’s home state, and events move ponderously to involve the private eye. In fact, Floyd doesn’t even step onto the book until nearly eighty pages in, and by then it’s almost too late for the reader to take interest.
When a second man is murdered who had ties to Ducane, Floyd starts poking into the truth of the assassination. He immediately draws fire from mafia dons, a JFK conspiracy investigator, and even the CIA. His fellow antiques dealer, Mario Santoni, ends up getting offered as the patsy for the assassination by mafia bosses in their 80s (which strains credulity a bit), so Floyd has more personal stakes involved than just his own curiosity.
Article comments
1 - Hartunien
I've only read the first five pages but the guy has real talent. It's the sort of style that scoops you up and carries you along.
There's a new non fiction book on the assassination called THE ROAD TO DALLAS. This book advances the conspiracy case using the official government files. Author is David Kaiser. It surely won't be as interesting as the fiction but important to read.