Back Bay Blues

Starred review from July 27, 2020
Set in 1985, Colt’s excellent second hard-boiled mystery featuring Boston PI Andy Roark (after 2019’s The Off-Islander) finds Roark, a Vietnam War vet still traumatized by his combat experiences, supporting himself with routine investigations, until Thuy Duong brings him the case of her journalist uncle, Hieu, a shooting victim. While the police have treated the murder as a botched mugging, Thuy believes Hieu was gunned down because of his reporting. Hieu was critical of the work of the Committee, an anti-communist group opposed to the Vietnamese regime. He’d told his newspaper colleagues that he believed that the Committee was fraudulent and was ripping off the Boston Vietnamese community rather than advancing its political agenda. Duong also suspects that her uncle’s death is related to the recent fatal stabbing of a Vietnamese businessman. The nature of the case inevitably reawakens some of Roark’s demons as he doggedly searches for the truth. Colt makes his wounded lead sympathetic, and balances a gripping plot with further development of Roark’s character. Jeremiah Healy fans looking for a new Beantown hero will be eager for more. Agent: Cynthia Manson, Cynthia Manson Literary.

August 1, 2020
It's Boston in the '80s, and Andy Roark, private eye and Vietnam vet, wants "to feel like I was relevant again." He's asked to solve the murder of two Vietnamese Americans involved in the mysterious "Committee," an organization vowing to drive the communists out of that beleaguered country. Roark's skill at his job is displayed amid a gift for self-conscious mockery, as though he knows he's a character in a novel. He models his mustache after Magnum's, totes a gun like Bond's, dresses spiffy like Spenser, but wonders if gun oil will stain his pretty blue shirt. Further, he offers a rare portrait of a type anyone who's been in the military will recognize: "What I had been desperate for as a child had been provided for me by the army." In flashbacks, he offers little-seen reportage on that awful war, like the desk-bound officers who take a helicopter tour of the war zone so they can qualify for hazardous-duty pay. There's plenty of room for detection and a blood-soaked finale, but it's these tidbits that linger.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

August 28, 2020

Private investigator Andy Roark has come to the streets of Boston for a fresh start and to escape some of the horror he witnessed years before in the Vietnam War as he deals with PTSD and survivor's guilt. Roark soon develops a strong friendship with a Vietnamese restaurant owner, Nguyen, whom he is able to share stories and drinks with and who eventually helps Roark settle some into the community. Roark is soon approached by a young Vietnamese woman to investigate the connection between the death of her uncle and another prominent businessman from Washington, DC Later, he witnesses Nguyen talking to some strange men who turn out to be extortionists sending money back to Vietnam. The investigation continues and soon Roark discovers a link between the dead men and the extortionists and his friend may be involved. VERDICT The second installment of Colt's 1980s-set series (after The Off-Islander) will lure fans of Robert Parker's Spenser into the atmospheric Boston setting. A tight plot, great characterization, and sensitive topics make this a good addition to library collections.

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