REVIEWED BY BARRY GARDNER:


LAWRENCE BLOCK – A Long Line of Dead Men. Matt Scudder #12. William Morrow, hardcover, 1994. Avon, paperback, 1996.

   Well, it had to happen: the first Scudder title that wasn’t five words. Does this have Significance? Is it a Portent of Momentous Change? Beats hell out of me.

   It’s a fairly strange men’s club, this “Club of 31.” All the 31 members do is meet once a year to mark and celebrate the passage of time, and when the roster is reduced to to one, the survivor recruits 30 more young men and the cycle begins again.

   The strangest thing, though, of how many of the current group have died the last 33 years — 14 of them. There’s no apparent connection to be made, but one of the survivors thinks the numbers are strange, and asks Scudder to either confirm his suspicion or set his mind at ease. The deaths have ranged from suicide to murder, and Scudder begins to seek a pattern.

   To me this was the weakest of Block’s books in a long, long time, at least since he hit his stride with Ginmill. He’s such a fine writer that I’m not sure he knows how to write a bad book any more, but I had problems with both the plot and pacing on this one.

   The plot weakness I can’t discuss other than to say I found the villain as eventually revealed to be enormously unlikely. The pacing simply struck me as overly slow — not something that usually bothers me — and more than a little jerky and episodic.

   Quite a few people have complained about the number of references to drinking and AA in past books, and here for the first time it bothered me as well. In a lesser writer’s prose this would have been a poor book; done by Block, it just wasn’t a terribly good one.

— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #15, September 1994.