Cross-posted from my blog:
http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2007/11/ticket-to-boneyard-by-lawrence-block.html
A TICKET TO THE BONEYARD by Lawrence Block (Avon 2002)
Twelve years ago, when Matt Scudder was a cop, a sociopath
named James Leo Motley began to terrorize his favorite
hooker. Motley had a rap sheet with lots of arrests for
violent crimes against women--but no convictions. Scudder
took no chances, and fudged the evidence a bit to make a case
against Motley stronger than it would have been. It worked,
and Motley went away for a long time. But now he's out, and
he's killing his way to Scudder (an "unlicensed private
investigator," by this point), through all the women who have
anything to do with him--even unrelated women with the same
last name! Scudder's desperately clinging to his relatively
newfound sobriety, but this case has him reaching for the
bottle . . .
I've mentioned before that I wasn't really crazy about Eight
Million Ways To Die, and basically wrote off Block and
Scudder on the basis of it. Well, I'm glad I decided to give
them both a second look, thanks at least in part to the Rara
Avis discussion group.
Block's often noted for his smooth, brisk prose and
storytelling, and they are indeed pretty damn good here.
Scudder comes alive on the page with complexity, flaws, and
the best he can do by way of virtues. Given what we see of
Motley leading up to the final confrontation, Scudder has
every reason to deal with the maniac the way he does, and yet
his motives are revealed to be almost cancerous in their
personal depth, mixed, murky, and painful to examine.
The single fault that stands out most in this novel is a
heavyhanded over-emphasis on Scudder's involvement with
Alcoholics Anonymous. While it does add several interesting
facets to the character, it really is overdone sometimes. I'm
sure Block is trying to make his depiction of a recovering
alcoholic as realistic and convincing as possible, and I know
they can get as wrapped up in AA as they used to be (or still
are) in alcohol itself, but it does get repetitious,
distracting, and downright boring in places, to say nothing
of the irksome tone of advocacy that occasionally seems to
creep into the writing at those points. I'm sure Block could
have conveyed it to better effect a lot more economically. He
could probably have dropped about thirty pages, just by
tightening up the alcoholism stuff, and it still would have
come across just as pervasively, only with a sharper
edge.
On the whole, though, this is truly first-rate stuff, and I
highly recommend it!
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