Mission Flats
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Nothing much happens in Versailles, Maine. Until a body is found in a cabin up by the lake. The dead man turns out to be from the Boston DA's office, a prosecutor who had been investigating a series of gang-related murders in that city. Ben Truman, Chief of Police, heads down to Boston to follow the few fragile leads he has in the case. Not welcomed by the police there, he knows he really should get the message and disappear back to the sticks. Big city crime is way beyond anything he's ever dealt with before.
But still Truman refuses to let it go. With the help of a retired cop who knows all the angles, he becomes embroiled in an investigation which has its roots in a sequence of deaths which began twenty years previously...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Forced by circumstances to become a small-town cop, the protagonist of former Boston district attorney Landay's inventive, gripping suspense debut finds himself embroiled in a big-city murder investigation. Ben Truman, the young police chief in the Maine town of Versailles (pronounced "Ver-sales"), tells us early on that he gave up his pursuit of a doctorate in history at Boston University to come home and care for his Alzheimer's-stricken mother. What he doesn't reveal at least right away is the true story of his mother's death and his father's alcoholic rages. Landay deals out pertinent details with the finesse of a poker player, first describing Ben's discovery of the bloated body of a Boston assistant district attorney in a rental cabin. Is the discovery really accidental? Is the almost immediate arrival on the scene of a retired Boston cop named John Kelly as fortuitous as it seems at first? Can Ben really be as much of a small-town hick (the Boston cops call him "Opie") as he appears to be? Determined to stay on the case, Ben joins a crew of big-city cops and prosecutors (including Kelly's intriguing daughter) in a search through the blighted (fictional) Boston neighborhood of Mission Flats for the answer to the ADA's murder and a 10-year-old mystery. As bits of his personal history surface, Ben occasionally seems in danger of violating one of the rules of crime fiction that the narrator shouldn't lie to us about his role in the story. But Landay's book is such a rich, harrowing and delightful read that few will complain.
