Friday, December 8, 2017

Review: Cash City

Cash City Cash City by Jonathan Fredrick
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This one starts out with promise. Nick Malick is a Chicago cop who’s moved to a mid-sized city in West Virginia for his doctor-wife. They’re divorced now, in large part because a sexual predator kidnapped and killed their only son. Malick has become a hard-drinking P.I., and he’s more or less waiting around until the man he’s convinced has killed his son gets out of jail.

The opening scene is right out of the Chandler playbook, but who’s complaining? A father hires him to find his missing daughter, and the trail leads to drugs, prostitution, and despair. There’s a gang coming in from Detroit, calling themselves Cash City, and they sell drugs and then buy guns to take back. They’re organized, and they’ve bought off enough local cops to be mostly untouchable

So the original frame of the narrative is strong – and Frederick does tone and description with real skill – and the plan to move it to a setting that gets so little attention is a good one. And this holds up for more than half of the novel in that vein.

But somewhere along the line, things go disappointingly awry. One premise of Chandler’s work is that, however bleak and fallen the world is, we see some of that fallen state in our detective as well. He’s a flawed man in a flawed world, and that’s part of what makes him effective.

In this one, it becomes increasingly clear that there’s a bogeyman (or bogeymen). It’s not just that the city is fallen; it’s that it’s infected. The gang is a plague – there’s even a hint of the Biblical sense to that since it takes a lot of first-born children. If it can be gotten rid of – and if the sexual predator can be killed – then it seems there’s hope for redemption.

I see the logic, but it seems an ethical cowardice after the opening structure. That is, Malick doesn’t really need to redeem himself; he just has to kill the bad guys. There’s simply less at stake than the first chapters implied.

And, to bring that point home, the predator becomes more and more monstrous. He’s always part of the novel, even though he’s a muted backstory figure to start. By the end, though, he’s a Hannibal Lecter knock-off, a sadist who’s been stalking his stalker. Frederick slips a couple notches in skill, imbuing the guy with a creepy quality that changes the entire tone of the novel.

It’s a shame that this takes the nose dive it does because Frederick seems to know what he’s doing when this begins. Finishing a book takes a knack, though. Instead of staying true to its intriguing early premises, this one grafts on a different genre altogether and the lurid conclusion undermines that opening promise.


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