First Lady
by Malone

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Book Summary Information

• ISBN13: 9781570719714
• Condition: USED - Very Good
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Summary of First Lady

Not quite so dramatically, Michael Malone apparently fell off the face of the earth. (He became a highly successful television writer, which is almost the same thing.) Today, even some sophisticated readers of mystery fiction have forgotten Malone, who wrote two masterpieces involving a pair of detectives in a small town in North Carolina, Justin Savile and Cuddy Mangum: Uncivil Seasons, one of the few nearly perfect novels in the history of detective fiction, published in 1983; and Time's Witness, in 1989. Unlike too many cops portrayed in detective fiction as stupid, corrupt, or both, Justin and Cuddy are fully developed as intelligent, honest cops who try to do their jobs as well as possible, even though they have their human flaws. Cuddy is arrogant and impatient; Justin drinks too much and likes the ladies a bit more than he should, seeing how he's married (just barely now, as his wife has moved out of the house). First Lady is the first volume about these terrific characters in more than decade. Thankfully, Malone's publisher is also releasing the first two books in trade paperback editions, which I can recommend as strongly as anything I've praised in Amazon.com's pages.

Very little is as it seems in this poetically written mystery novel. A serial killer seems to be on the loose, but is he really a serial killer? Justin discovers a pattern that seems brilliantly thought out and then, as in E.C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case, holes are punched through the theory by various members of the law enforcement community (including, in this case, two women from the FBI). First Lady is utterly contemporary, with some gruesomely described violence and a healthy dose of (very discreet) sex, but it's also a wonderfully constructed old-fashioned puzzler, with a cornucopia of clever clues, a near-surplus of suspicious suspects, and a boatful of red herrings guaranteed to fool the most assiduous armchair detective.

Welcome back, Mr. Malone. And don't make us wait another dozen years for the next Justin and Cuddy novel! --Otto Penzler

Literature & Fiction Books

• Books > Subjects
• Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery
• Police Procedurals
• Thrillers > Legal