Book Review: The Fall Guy

I was in the mood for a quick-read mystery and finished the newly released 'The Fall Guy' by James Lasdun in two sittings and a plane ride.  The award-winning British author teaches creative writing at Columbia University and elsewhere.

It seems to me that mysteries fall into two camps - ones that set up the mystery well, but falter in the resolution.  Others that are middling in their plot, but finish with a bang.  A few get both right and we are in for a treat as readers.
An example of the first type are the Hermione Bosch stories by Harlan Coben.   Netlfix has been producing a series on Bosch recently.   An example of the latter, where the plot is acceptable but finish with a flourish include the early Patricia Cromwell novels like Potter's Field.

Of course, since mysteries are about how the puzzle is solved, the latter stories scratch the mystery itch better.

So the question is, how does 'The Fall Guy' stack up against this measure?

The first third  of the book is really evocative.  The setting is Manhattan and upper New York state where the ‘little millionaires’ from the Bill Clinton era have bought houses.  There are four lead characters in the story.  A couple, the husband's friend and the spouse's 'friend.'  The characters are all quite contemporary and easy to relate to.  In fact, for some of those passages, I called out to my wife and read them out to her and elicited a chuckle or two of recognition.

Just when you are getting a bit restless with endless rounds of cooking and pontificating about Occupy Wall Street and other such conversation threads, the second third and the mystery kicks in and the story speeds up.  There is an affair and a murder (of course).  The murder is described as an accident in the narrative.

The third part was fun.  It was like Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo with each of the characters getting shakier in their behavior, and your assumptions of them as a reader beginning to change.  Was the killing an accident?  Will the cops make the connection?  Can everyone continue to pretend not to know?  Is something from the past actually driving this behavior (for all of them)?

So far so good!  The author has managed to get his mystery, characters and plot just right.

Now, the question from up top of this review - can he invest time in the last chapter and/or epilogue to make the mystery fly?

I was ready!  Let's go James Lasdun, I said to myself ...

Unfortunately, he didn't stick the landing!  The resolution came quickly in two pages and was shamefully lame.  The cops did not have to work too hard.  The discovery is by happenstance and by a stray remark.  And even the shaky character whose shakiness precipitated the mystery is not properly described.

As much as I would like to say the book is a fun read for its taut and economical writing and contemporary characters, it is billed as a mystery and on that count it falls short.