JOSEPH LOUIS – Madelaine. Bantam, paperback original; 1st printing, March 1987.

   Billed as an “Evan Paris Mystery,” here’s a prime example of how detective work can be used as a means for personal therapy. Paris was once an investigator of sorts, but then became a best-author and was even nominated for an Oscar as a screenwriter.

   When his wife was kidnapped and murdered, however, his life went into a downward spiral and into a complete funk for over a year. Until, that is, he’s asked to find the father of a little old lady’s three-year-old granddaughter. Trudy’s mother Madelaine was also a murder victim, and it’s the mall similarity between the two cases that brings Evan Paris back to life again.

   Tracking down Madelaine’s past is like chasing down a ghost, however, a veritable will-o’-the-wisp. Lew Archer was never haunted as greatly as this by his own memories. But as in Ross Macdonald’s work, this is a case that depends a great deal on untangling the myriad threads in more than one family’s lives, and unraveling the secrets that most of them would prefer to keep concealed.

   This is a powerfully emotional book, there’s no denying it, but as a mystery, I think most readers will put the pieces together just a little faster than Evan Paris does.

Bibliographic Update: This book was nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Original Private Eye Paperback by the Private Eye Writers of America, and for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel by the Crime Writers of Canada in 1988. A second and final book in the series was The Trouble with Stephanie (Bantam, 1988).

   Prior to this series, the author published five books under his own name, Joseph Mark Glazner, about a character named Billy Nevers (Warner, paperback originals, between 1979 and 1981). The New York Times described Nevers as “a wheeler‐dealer in the world of finance, the creation of Joseph Mark Glazner, a Toronto public relations man.”