cover image Deep Kill: A Micah Dunn Mystery

Deep Kill: A Micah Dunn Mystery

M. K. Shuman. St. Martin's Press, $0 (199pp) ISBN 978-0-312-05854-8

Happenstance plays the major role in this unsatisfying third Micah Dunn mystery (after The Caesar Clue ). One-armed New Orleans investigator Dunn is hired by his friend Calvin Autry, a mechanic charged with molesting a black teenage boy. Autry says he's innocent and being set up, and he can list three enemies: his new landlord, a lawyer who sued over a repair job and a man who reneged on a deal. But Dunn digs up some potentially compromising facts--Autry's wife deserted him for unexplained reasons, and Autry visits kids in hospitals and schools while disguised as Calvin the Clown. When the body of the teenager is found on a levee, Autry hides out from the law--and from Dunn. As Dunn attempts to prove Autry's innocence, he runs up against a powerful black minister, the female head of a child-prostitution ring, a nightclub where drug deals are made and another detective, who is killed. Each promising lead seems to be a red herring, until Dunn recalls parallel clues in novels by G. K. Chesterton and Arthur Conan Doyle. By then, however, credibility has been stretched past the breaking point. and the resolution falls flat. (July)