Let It Burn

May 6, 2013
Edgar-winner Hamilton puts a fresh twist on the archetypical tough-guy cop with a heart of gold in his 10th Alex McKnight novel (after 2012’s Die a Stranger). The upcoming release of Darryl King, a murderer McKnight helped put behind bars, draws the old cop out of near-isolation in the remote town of Paradise, Mich., and brings him back to Detroit—or, rather, what’s left of it. McKnight has a gut instinct that King may not have been guilty of the crime after all. As he reaches out to old contacts, including the detective who obtained King’s confession, McKnight becomes convinced that the case isn’t as airtight as it appeared at the time. Hamilton’s prose feels most human at the moments when McKnight surveys the emerging ruins of Detroit, like an archeologist come too soon to the excavation site. Yet the intrigue, like McKnight’s gut instinct, sometimes seems based on little more than a feeling. Agent: Jane Chelius, Jane Chelius Literary Agency.

July 1, 2013
Michigan's Upper Peninsula will have to take care of itself this time. A newly paroled convict has recalled Alex McKnight (Misery Bay, 2011, etc.) to Detroit past and present. Before a shooting sidelined him from the Detroit PD, Alex helped put away Darryl King, a 16-year-old black kid he saw running from the scene of Wayne State student Elana Paige's murder. Over several grueling days, Alex first chased the boy, then went through volume after volume of mug shots and finally played a key role in the arrest that was credited to Detective Arnie Bateman. Now Alex's old sergeant, Tony Grimaldi, wants him to know that Darryl is back on the street. Alex, who admits that "I don't have much of a talent for putting things out of my mind," can't stop himself from making the five-hour drive down to Detroit, where he has dinner with FBI agent Janet Long and improbably shares milk and chocolate cake with Darryl's mother, Jamilah King, who thinks he's come to apologize for locking up the wrong man. And, in fact, the more Alex thinks about it, the more he wonders if Darryl really did stab Elana Paige to death. Just as he's convinced himself that Darryl's mother is right after all, Arnie Bateman is killed under circumstances that make Darryl look guiltier than ever. So Alex is left in the ironic position of desperately trying to track down and vindicate a man he was once equally desperate to track down and lock up. Hamilton always gives good value, and this swift-moving, moody tale is no exception, even if the very last twist is perhaps one too many.

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July 1, 2013

Hamilton's Edgar Award-winning series is back with number ten (after Die a Stranger). McKnight must confront an old case that still haunts him from his days as a cop in Detroit.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2013
A teenager Alex McKnight helped arrest for a savage murder is being released from prison. McKnight decides to make a sentimental journey to Detroit, scene of his finest hours as a cop as well as subsequent events that derailed his life and caused him to seek refuge on Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula. But soon after his arrival in the city, he begins to think he may have helped send an innocent teenager to prison, and he is determined to set things right. Let It Burn reads like several different kinds of novel. It begins with a man approaching 60, looking back ruefully on events that ended the life he'd anticipated. Then, in flashback, it describes the frantic hunt for the murderer before returning to the present and becoming a private-eye novel. By turns, it is either gauzy and impressionistic or a minutely detailed procedural. McKnight's vision of now-devastated Detroit is tremendously compelling, but the changes in tone are jarring, and several plot convolutions at the book's end strain credulity.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)