REVIEWED BY BARRY GARDNER:


JON KATZ – Family Stalker. Kit Deleeuw #2, Doubleday, hardcover, 1994. Bantam, paperback, 1995.

   I didn’t expect to like this. I had it pegged as a suburban cozy from the title of his first novel, Death by Station Wagon, and the fact that the lead was a PI with an office in a mall, f’chrissake.

   Kit Deleeuw is a refugee from the Wall Street of the 80s, an innocent worker in a firm not so innocent, but nevertheless hounded out of the profession and now working as a private investigator in a New Jersey suburb. His wife works in New York as a social worker while working on her degree in psychology, and he does as many of the parenting and housely chores as she, if not more.

   He is hired by a lady lawyer in his town to investigate a woman that she says is deliberately trying to destroy her family. He doesn’t like divorce work, but that’s not what the woman wants; she just wants to find out why this person is doing what she’s doing. He takes the case, but has barely begun when the lawyer’s husband is murdered. and she seems to be the only suspect. The woman he is investigating has disappeared, and the facets of her character that come to light are puzzling and contradictory. Then there’s another murder.

   I was wrong; it’s not a cozy. It’s really sort of grim, even though Katz uses a lot of words describing suburban life, raising kids, and the characters of Kit and his wife. Oddly enough, I enjoyed reading it all. The things he had to say struck me as interesting and apt, ad while there’s no question that they slowed the story down, I didn’t think they did unduly. I liked his prose, and thought he handled the first person narration well.

   Deleeuw struck me as a reasonably believable character, and not at all typical of either the hardboiled private detective or the cozy sleuth. I found the other characters realistic enough with a few minor exceptions, and though the mystery itself was nothing exceptional, neither was it offensive

   All in all, a pleasant surprise. Maybe that’ll teach me not to pre-judge.

— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #11, January 1994.


      The “Suburban Detective” series —

1. Death by Station Wagon (1993)

2. The Family Stalker (1994)
3. The Last Housewife (1995)
4. The Fathers’ Club (1996)
5. Death Row (1998)