George Young investigates insurance claims for a law office whose founder, now long dead, invited him into the firm when he was not long out of law school. So when the founder’s widow asks him to investigate the circumstances of her son’s death, George feels he owes it to her husband’s memory to agree. There’s nothing suspicious about the death itself: Roger Corbett can be clearly seen in a security videotape, coming out of a bar at one-thirty in the morning and, while staring at a piece of paper in his hand, stepping into the path of an oncoming truck and being run down. What his mother wants to know is what her son was doing and thinking before he died, why he sat in that bar until the wee hours. She’d already hired a private investigator, but after a very little digging, he has quit the job, and when George interviews him, he is advised not to get involved, that this matter is not what it looks like.
George interviews the superintendent of Corbett’s apartment building and gets the name of Corbett’s girl friend, a mysterious Czech woman. George talks to the bartender where Corbett was drinking the night he died, and the bartender tells him he and the private investigator are not the only ones asking questions about Corbett. Once again George is warned off. But he goes deeper, finds that he is being followed, and begins to discover where the danger will come from.
The process George follows is not that different from the methods of hard-boiled private eyes in books from The Maltese Falcon on. But George is not a tough guy. Looking at his reasons for pursuing Corbett’s story, he has a moment of realization: he’s been telling himself that he’s just paying back a debt he owes to Corbett’s father for giving him a good job, but in fact, he finds that he is reacting to the boredom of his life. The question then becomes, just how much risk is he willing to take? He finds out when he has to deal with Russian mobsters and ultimately, with the fact that he himself was unwittingly involved in Roger Corbett’s life and death.
Colin Harrison lives in Brooklyn and critics note the way he is able to recreate the look and feel of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the other boroughs, as well as the way he populates his novels with characters New Yorkers recognize as their own neighbors. Harrison, who has been an editor at Harper’s and is now chief editor at Scribner’s, trained at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is a careful stylist and constructor of plots. He has no series character and each of the eight novels he has written so far involves a different cast, though all are set in New York.
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