Back Bay Blues

Set in 1985, Colt’s excellent second hard-boiled mystery featuring Boston PI Andy Roark (after 2019’s The Off-Islander) finds Roark, a Vietnam War vet still traumatized by his combat experiences, supporting himself with routine investigations, until Thuy Duong brings him the case of her journalist uncle, Hieu, a shooting victim. While the police have treated the murder as a botched mugging, Thuy believes Hieu was gunned down because of his reporting. Hieu was critical of the work of the Committee, an anti-communist group opposed to the Vietnamese regime. He’d told his newspaper colleagues that he believed that the Committee was fraudulent and was ripping off the Boston Vietnamese community rather than advancing its political agenda. Duong also suspects that her uncle’s death is related to the recent fatal stabbing of a Vietnamese businessman. The nature of the case inevitably reawakens some of Roark’s demons as he doggedly searches for the truth. Colt makes his wounded lead sympathetic, and balances a gripping plot with further development of Roark’s character. Jeremiah Healy fans looking for a new Beantown hero will be eager for more. Agent: Cynthia Manson, Cynthia Manson Literary. (Sept.)