My Darling Detective

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, March 2017. Hardcover. First Edition / Full number line. Very Good book in a Fine jacket. Gift inscription on front free endpage, otherwise Fine. Not from a library. No remainder mark. Not clipped. 245 pages.

Jacob Rigolet, a soon-to-be former assistant to a wealthy art collector, looks up from his seat at an auction--his mother, former head librarian at the Halifax Free Library, is walking almost casually up the aisle. Before a stunned audience, she flings an open jar of black ink at master photographer Robert Capa's "Death on a Leipzig Balcony." Jacob's police detective fiancée, Martha Crauchet, is assigned to the ensuing interrogation. In My Darling Detective, Howard Norman delivers a fond nod to classic noir, as Jacob's understanding of the man he has always assumed to be his father unravels against the darker truth of Robert Emil, a Halifax police officer suspected but never convicted of murdering two Jewish residents during the shocking upswing of anti-Semitism in 1945. The denouement, involving a dire shootout and an emergency delivery--it's the second Rigolet to be born in the Halifax Free Library in a span of three decades--is Howard Norman at his provocative, haunting, and uncannily moving best.