Digital Sextant

Big City Bad Blood

by Sean Chercover

I started this book two months ago when my book club read it, but wasn’t able to attend the meeting and so put it down after 40 pages or so.  Something about the book didn’t work for me.  Never one to give up easily on a book, I picked it back up this week and found it to be much more interesting.

Big City Bad Blood follows the adventures of awesomely named Ray Dudgeon, a hard hitting Chicago P.I. with a cranky streak that reminds me a lot of Chandler or Hammett characters.  He’s grouchy.  He’s hired to provide protection services to a location scout who finds himself embroiled in a political / mob conflagration.  Some thoughts:

• Chercover’s action sequences work well, and the environment of Chicago works well, though his view of the city sure is seemier than mine.  I guess I don’t travel in the P.I. circles very easily though.
• Dudgeon’s interaction with women works pretty well, but he tends to be a bit too stereotypically assholish for my taste.  You don’t need to be such a crank.
• The ethics of murder and self-defense come up at one point in a way that works really well.  I like the interplay of the police and Dudgeon, and his own internal reasoning about guilt and actions are solid and entertaining.
• The side characters are solidly-drawn and function nicely, with a good mix of returning/repeating characters and one-offs that serve as touch-stones in Ray’s progress through the mystery.
• The mystery itself resolves pretty quickly, putting the book in the contemporary category of “thriller.”  So does the bullet-ridden cover art.

Overall, not bad.  Some of the dialogue feels a little wooden, but it’s a good first outing.  Plus the author photo in the back looks like it could be Ray Dudgeon himself, scowling at the camera.  Yikes.