East of A

The plot is fairly straightforward. Sherwood is beaten up by a trio of street thugs when he attempts to stop them from attacking a runaway teenage girl. No good deed goes unpunished, and while he's lying in the street the girl steals his Rolex watch, the only valuable thing he owns. After cleaning himself up, Sherwood goes in search of the watch. That premise doesn't exactly compell one to keep reading, and it was only Atwood's light and easy prose that kept me interested.

The case takes some unexpected turns when Sherwood discovers that the thugs are after the girl because they believe the girl stole a new designer drug from their boss, a wealthy eccentric dance club owner. From there Sherwood encounters a trail of murder and deceit. The New York street scenes are well described and the characters that inhabit them are fairly well drawn (except, curiously, for the girl, who the reader never really gets to know). Unltimately, the story just doesn't amount to all that much, though there is one grisly scene in which two men fall out a high window that is quite shocking and shows that Atwood has potential as a storyteller. He just needs more scenes like that one.

Overall, "East of A" is not a bad novel, just not a terribly memorable one.

That said, East of A is a good solid read. Despite one horrid, "Got milk"-one-liner, Payton Sherwood comes across an accessible, if not ambiguous crime-solver. Still the relationships Atwood manages to develop between his PI and the swirling group of characters around him builds well.

If you're a big reader always on the lookout for your next book, this is probably one to check out. If you're dipping your toe into this genre I'd go for a heavier hitter--something like Motherless Brooklyn. Otherwise we'll wait for Atwood's next book and hope its even better.

Russell Atwood is off to a fantastic start, seizing all of the noir conventions and making them work for a new generation. Payton Sherwood isn't a knight on a white horse. He's just a working stiff trying to get through the day with his hide intact and keep his conscience square with the house.

Noir fiction, the best at least, is a morality play pitting a flawed hero against the temptations of lust, greed, anger and revenge. The characters the hero comes across during his investigation inevitably serve as avatars of these various human frailties. Our pay-off as readers comes when the hero, despite his personal woes, does the right thing, the thing we all hope we would do in his situation, but aren't sure we would.

Atwood seems to understand this emotional dynamic implicitly. What he brings to the table is a fantastic ear for snappy dialogue and characterizations that refuse to divide cleanly into black and white absolutes.

This is a fast read and it's well worth the time and money. Russell Atwood is on his way to a great career as a mystery writer and commentator on modern mores.