On Harrow Hill

Starred review from January 4, 2021
Verdon’s brilliant seventh mystery featuring retired NYPD homicide detective Dave Gurney (after 2018’s White River Burning) showcases a nifty impossible crime variant. Gurney’s former partner, Mike Morgan, who once saved his life, is now the police chief of the affluent village of Larchfield, N.Y., where Gurney now lives and crime is low. Then an intruder slashes the throat of Angus Russell, Larchfield’s main power player, in his home. The killer’s identity appears to be obvious, as the fingerprints of Billy Tate, a local ex-con who threatened Russell, are found in Russell’s bedroom, but it’s impossible for Tate to be guilty. The night before, Tate was pronounced dead after being struck by lightning and falling from the roof of a church he was vandalizing in front of multiple witnesses, including Morgan. Gurney joins the inquiry, which gets even weirder after a video shows Tate breaking out of the coffin where his body was stored. The surprises keep coming as the plot builds to an impressive reveal. Verdon has never been better at crafting a bizarre setup and resolving it in a satisfactory way. Agent: Lucy Carson, Friedrich Agency.

January 15, 2021
The seventh Dave Gurney thriller opens with a lesson on the unreliability of eyewitnesses and then takes up a series of lurid crimes committed in a village where nothing is what it seems. Super-detective Gurney, retired from the NYPD, is still periodically drawn into especially difficult investigations, which is why his former partner Mike Morgan has called. Morgan's departure from the NYPD was not as unblemished as Gurney's, but he has landed well and is now chief of police in Larchfield, home to a number of wealthy individuals and mostly the creation of the Russell family. When Angus Russell, the current patriarch, is murdered in his own mansion, there is considerable uproar, and Morgan asks Gurney to help manage the investigation and divert a little of the world's attention from himself. The crime-scene evidence points directly at Billy Tate, a man who had strong motives for murdering Russell but who was, frustratingly, already dead, the victim of a lightning strike the day before Russell was killed. From this puzzling but admittedly gripping beginning, the investigation uncovers progressively more baroque variations on the theme of deceptive appearances. First, it's established that Tate might have survived the lightning bolt and the subsequent fall from the church steeple, because he was a tough guy and, well, who knows about lightning? More bodies pile up, and the emergence of several characters who also might have wanted Russell dead suggests that Tate may have had help. Morgan, while not actually obstructing the investigation, seems to have reasons to want the case closed quickly. At each turn, Gurney helps to classify, consider, and clarify evidence and the theories the evidence gives rise to, but he, too, is somewhat misled. The residents of Larchfield are an admirably unlovable bunch, seething with resentments and snubbed privilege, and Gurney and his wife are pleasantly down-to-earth, but overall the plot mechanics reach too far beyond the merely astonishing. Well-drawn characters and a dynamic situation but in the end, just a bit too much.

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May 14, 2021
Longing for a detective hero who isn't a screw-up seeking redemption as he trudges through the world's underbelly? Meet Dave Gurney, a retired NYPD detective secretly pleased when he's called in on a case requiring deductive powers--his colleagues call him Sherlock. And the crimes happen in a flossy upstate New York village where there's ""not a single wilted petal in the village flowerbeds."" The murder he's investigating seems clear-cut, with prints and DNA in abundance. Problem is, they belong to a fellow who was dead when the murder happened. But maybe he wasn't dead. Maybe he came back to life; tests show his coffin was opened from the inside. Verdon combines sharp writing, fascinating characters, an action-filled ending, and a plot reminiscent of, of all people, John Dickson Carr and his detective Gideon Fell--outlandish in our world but sensible inside the logic of the novel. ""Things that make no sense at first,"" Gurney says, ""often tell you the most in the end."" Like how shoelaces are tied. Or which hand is holding the knife. A glorious explosion of detective fireworks.

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