Murder, Mystery On Long Island

A sense of place and strong central and auxiliary characters are vital to good crime novels, perhaps more so than an inventive puzzle, a surprising twist or a startling denouement.

Reed Farrel Coleman, whose 22 published novels include nine in the acclaimed Moe Prager series, knows the importance of well-drawn heroes and villains, and of creating an environment that readers can see, hear and feel.

“Where It Hurts” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2016) introduces his latest flawed, haunted gumshoe – retired Suffolk County (NY) cop Gus Murphy – and a setting that is far different from the beaches, leafy suburbs and walled estates that many associate with Long Island. His landscape consists of tawdry banquet halls, tired strip malls and working-class (or worse) towns and neighborhoods.

“Outsiders don’t get Long Island; most New Yorkers don’t understand it,” Coleman writes. “They can’t see past the beaches and the Sound, the Hamptons and the Gold Coast, the country clubs and marinas. But most of the island isn’t about Gatsby. A current of poverty and violence toils beneath the surface, too.”

And that’s one of the delights of “Where It Hurts:” Come along on an insider’s guide to the underbelly of what appears to be all glitz and glamour. Coleman’s incorporation of the landmarks and lesser-known signposts of New York’s easternmost county will interest those familiar with the territory and intrigue the unfamiliar.

As the novel opens, Murphy has lost everything – his family, his home, himself – after the sudden death two years earlier of his 20-year-old son, John Jr., who collapsed during a game of pickup basketball from a heretofore unknown heart defect.

Reflecting on his life now and then, he says, “I’d gotten those few things in life I did want: a loving family, a good job, a nice house. …until John Jr. died, I felt like I had my little piece of the world by the balls.”

Now he’s adrift – working as a nighttime courtesy van driver and house detective for a hotel that, as Murphy says, is “a way station, a place to pass through on the way to or from the airport.” It, like Murphy, has seen better days. Now it is merely a convenient harbor – for travelers and for the night-shift workers who “seemed to be hiding out or running away.”

Murphy’s nighttime world is populated with such characters. There’s Aziza, the Pakistani Dunkin’ Donuts counter girl for whom Murphy weeps when, at the end of the novel, she returns to Karachi – for a supposed arranged marriage – and is replaced by another young woman seeking opportunity in the land of promise. Then there’s Felix, the Filipino desk clerk, soft-spoken and fearful. And Slava Podalak, the “crazy night bellman from Warsaw,” who somehow knows how to neutralize bad guys, handle a gun and find tracking devices under Murphy’s car. (These particular talents, and Slava’s unspoken back story that hints at Russian mafia or Balkan atrocities, guarantee a recurring role in the second Gus Murphy novel.)  Murphy moves through his nightly routine as an automaton, but his self-inflicted exile from the world ends when ex-con Tommy Delcamino asks for help. Delcamino seeks out Murphy because he was the only cop who treated repeat-offender Delcamino respectfully. Four months earlier, a man walking his dog discovered the tortured body of Tommy’s son, T.J., in a vacant lot. But the Suffolk County PD seems uninterested in finding T.J.’s killer, or even following up on the leads that Tommy provides. Murphy reluctantly decides to look into the case, and the murder of Delcamino Sr. makes Murphy even more determined to exact justice.  Along the way, we meet more other-side-of-Long Island characters, including a mafia capo, a drug lord and various cops who repeatedly warn Murphy to drop the case.

As Murphy works to solve the murders he also finds his way back into the land of the living. And therein lie what the severest critic could cite as the novel’s weaknesses: a not wholly-unexpected outcome; and Murphy’s too-quick recovery from his depression and ennui. His melancholy seems to melt away in just a few months’ time, as December’s snowstorms at the beginning of the novel give way to spring.

But those are minor faults. Reed Farrel Coleman has delivered to readers a worthy new hero in Gus Murphy – and in Suffolk County a rich setting that he has only begun to mine.