A Day in the Life of Louis Bloom: The Second McCusker Mystery

Irish author Charles’s fine sequel to 2014’s Down on Cypress Avenue finds Brendy McCusker, a retired Ulster detective inspector who sometimes helps the Belfast police, and Det. Insp. Lily O’Carroll interviewing Elizabeth Bloom, the wife of Queen’s University lecturer Louis Bloom, in her living room late one night. Four hours earlier, Louis abruptly walked out of the house. Normally, 48 hours have to pass before the police can respond to a missing person’s report, but Elizabeth’s sister, Angela, is the wife of Supt. Niall Larkin, who’s in effect the boss of both McCusker and O’Carroll. On receiving Elizabeth’s distress call, Angela persuaded her husband to act immediately. McCusker and O’Carroll’s search for Louie leads them to Queen’s University, where they discover a host of suspects, including scheming academics and a shady American. The crime solving takes a backseat to an examination of a tangle of unusual relationships, starting with the Blooms’. Louis’s lectures on love were famous, but he and Elizabeth, as fond as they were of each other, stopped having sex early in their marriage. Charles’s skillful depiction of the many sides of love and its strange bypaths lifts this clever novel well above the genre average. (Aug.)