If I start liking somewhat unethical lawyer characters like those in Paul Levine’s THE DEEP BLUE ALIBI and now William Lashner’s MARKED MAN, I’m going to have to revise my Hierarchy of Despisement™ to move reporters to the bottom of the list instead of legal beagles. It is true that Lashner’s series protagonist, Victor Carl, certainly has an illicit and devious mind, but he also has that clichéd heart of gold and a relentless drive just not to get results, but the right result.

In the opening, Carl wakes up after a wild night on the town to discover that he has a new beautiful heart-and-flowers tattoo emblazoned on his chest (hence the title) and sporting the unknown-to-him name of “Chantal Adair.” Who is Chantal and how did this happen? Well, alcohol consumption might answer that second question. But the first can only be answered by a full-scale investigation which Carl undertakes. However, he’s soon distracted by a request from a dying Greek woman who only wants to see her criminal son one more time before she passes. Carl then discovers that the woman’s son participated in an ages-old heist of a local Philadelphia art museum that managed to score an authentic painting by Rembrandt. And you know these cases are going to be connected, don’t you?

Lashner writes in the first-person, allowing him to present Carl as a cynical, jaded ironist who sometimes has pertinent things to say. I bookmarked half a dozen pages to use here but as an example of Carl’s thinking, this one is especially apropros: “There’s a line that you pass, Joey told me, it’s hard to see, a bit blurry, but there for sure. On one side of the line, all the dreams in your life are still possible. On the other side they’ve become fantasies you only pretend to believe, because having nothing to believe is too close to death. Fool’s dreams, Joey called them, sad little lies. There’s that line, and the four of them, they had blown past that line years before, never looking back.”

This is the underlying motivation behind some of the choices that Carl makes, choices he might have wanted to give a second thought to making, if you get my drift.

Dialogue here is brisk and realistic, and keeps the book moving at an action-film pace. A couple of the characters are just completely outrageous, though, including the antique buyer Lavender Hill and the gratuitously repellent and unlikely ultimate perpetrator. Carl’s best interactions come with Monica Adair, Chantal’s sister, who also is searching for the mysterious Chantal. Their teamwork would be welcome to explore in a future installment, although the final disposition of Monica seems way too off-base to accept.

Anyway, MARKED MAN has great Philadelphia/New Jersey flavor, and while it doesn’t have a lot of art gallery atmosphere, that world does serve as an important cog in the plot. Victor Carl is one of those larger-than-life bon vivants who has a welcome streak of insecurity, giving him a nice factor of likability. This is an action thriller, with a little bit of clever courtroom antics thrown in, and it should appeal to a broad audience of mystery lovers. –Mark Rose

Buy it at Amazon.
Discuss it in our forums.