RICHARD HAWKE – Speak of the Devil. Random House, hardcover, January 2006. Ballantine, paperback, February 2007.

   This one starts out in grand fashion, with a mass shooting at a Manhattan Thanksgiving Day parade by someone (perhaps) with a personal vendetta with the mayor. PI Fritz Malone, whose first recorded case this is, is a witness and chases after the killer. He shoots him in the shoulder … and then things start to get weird.

   Malone is nabbed by the police, put into a patrol car, a bag is placed over his head, and he is rushed off to places unknown. And the shooter, who was only wounded, somehow ends up dead, shot to death at police headquarters.

   Eventually things get straightened out re Fritz vs the cops, and (this is also not strictly kosher, I don’t imagine) Malone is asked by the mayor to work on the case: the unknown someone who hired the now dead killer now is blackmailing the city for millions of dollars, and to prove his point, he is methodically cutting the fingers off a kidnapped city official.

   So this is not exactly standard PI fare, yet in another way, Fritz Malone is very little different from other wisecracking PI’s with girl friends who try to be patient and understanding while their guys are off doing their PI thing. This part of the story I enjoyed a whole lot more than the bigger picture.

   Which reminds me of another thing. When I got to page 164 or so, which is about where the Gold Medal paperbacks of the 1950s used to end, I looked at where I was in the book, and I was surprised to see that I was barely over halfway through. And the second half, unfortunately, was not nearly as interesting as the first half. There is simply too much story in this book. (I have not yet told you about the novice nun who committed suicide in one of New York City’s many parks a while back. How she is connected, you will have to read the book.)

   One thing toward the end of the book annoyed me immensely. [This may warrant a SPOILER ALERT.] Malone has an important — no, crucial — piece of evidence which he gives to Margo, his girl friend, and asks her to take it to Brooklyn to give to her father, an invalid ex-cop, with the killer still on the loose. Have you seen this gambit on TV before?

   Pages 317-318, in which Malone explains everything after all the excitement has died down, are really a mess. These two pages are filled solid with Ramos did this so Carroll did that, Cox said this and Cox said that, then McNally did this in return, then Byron did this and Sister Natividad was — and who’s Margaret King?

   This book was given a big fanfare when it first came out, a big budget promotion, an huge advertising campaign, floor displays in bookstores, the whole works. I hope the author, in reality mystery writer Tim Cockey, got a big advance. There was one other book for Fritz Malone, Cold Day in Hell (Random House, 2007), but I don’t think the ad campaign worked. In spite of the hullabaloo and critical acclaim from several quarters, neither book seems to have gone anywhere.