In Jonathan King’s A KILLING NIGHT, Max Freeman is a South Florida private investigator working for childhood friend Billy Manchester – one of the state’s most prestigious attorneys, -- when an old girlfriend of his, current police detective Sherry Richards, calls him up asking for a meeting.
Richards is investigating the mysterious disappearance of several women. All are bartenders, and none left word with family members, or employers, that they were leaving. They simply were gone. The police officially viewed them as transients; Richards believes crimes have been committed, and she believes the man responsible is a former Philadelphia cop, and colleague of Freeman, Colin O’Shea.
She made an attempt to lure O’Shea out and catch him in his guilt when she went undercover as a female bartender herself; but this effort proved futile when O’Shea’s still-acutely active police instincts pegged her as a cop. Now, with Freeman, she is hoping to use his familiarity with O’Shea – the congenial academy training the two men share – to expose her hunches about him as correct. He seduced these women, killed them, and then hid their bodies somewhere they would never be discovered.
The problem, for Freeman, is he’s never entirely convinced of O’Shea’s complicity in any crime. Sure, the guy was known for being a bit too excessive in the use of force. But abducting women and then killing them? That seemed a bit of a stretch.
In addition to this, Freeman is already involved in a case for Billy where cruise ship workers are being bullied by the cruise line employing them. Then, to complicate matters further, O’Shea tags Freeman the moment he walks into Archie’s Bar (as he did with Detective Richards), the hangout where Richards told Freeman he could find the man. O’Shea remembered him from Philly; he connects him with Richards; he knows she sent him to Archie’s looking for him.
Okay. What does one do now? How is it possible to catch a cop who is a killer when he knows everything the cops trying to catch him already know?
The acute sense of a policeman, or in Freeman and O’Shea’s case, former policemen, are subtly at the forefront of this mystery of missing women. Jonathan King lays out their inherent skills in such an adroit manner, the story become, to a degree, something of a detective game of chess. Freeman does the leg work of a solid investigator; interviewing people, collecting information from what the people tell him and what his police instincts make clear. This was a fascinating trait I thoroughly enjoyed watching develop. It makes Freeman an instantly likeable character you can follow through to the end. You trust him.
It was likewise compelling the way King retained the identity of the man Freeman and Richards are hunting. The first three chapters start the book with three seemingly unrelated events, which made me wonder. It isn’t until at least halfway into the book when a clear idea of who this guy is materializes. Until that point, everyone is a suspect – even Freeman himself! That took some skill on King’s part to infer possible blame on the protagonist. There is a family scenario Freeman revisits in Philadelphia, while not integral to the plot; it still makes a reader, again, wonder.
This was my first Max Freeman novel, and following what I read here in A KILLING NIGHT, King gave me no reason to make it my last. He successfully has taken the classic private eye from the Sam Spade era and transplanted him from the darkened alleys of the big city into the verdant and lush landscapes under the Florida sun. You like the detective mystery of those days? You will like A KILLING TIME from Jonathan King
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