The Final Silence by Stuart Neville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Neville's The Final Silence is a well crafted detective/crime novel in the modern noir grain. Compelling characters and an intriguing set-up--an old man lets himself die and his young heir finds a strange album filled with letters and "souvenirs" that implicate the dead man in a decades-long series of murders--combined with the effectiveness of Neville's prose and his masterful pacing make this an excellent read.
The main protagonist, Jack Lennon, certainly has the marks of the modern noir detective with his substance abuse and a hard life made harder by not playing nice with corruption and graft, but his story arc (at least in this, the fourth in the series) keeps him from being forgettable. I like it when a character develops, something that is too often overlooked in detective stories, and the Lennon of the end of the book is not the same as the one at the beginning. There are plenty of hints at Lennon's difficult past (one suspects these would be less "hints" and more "reminders" if one had read the first three books), and you get a real sense of the loss and frustration he feels over the way his life has turned out.
The Final Silence is blessed with an assorted cast of characters beyond Lennon, from low-life crooks and crooked cops to hard-nosed but honest detectives, which help to round out the story nicely. I particularly like DCI Flanagan, and hope to see her in future books. Neville does a nice job handling her in a way that keeps her from becoming cliché; in a lesser writer's hands, she'd have become two dimensional and annoying, but the personal touches and the brief glimpses of her inner life flesh her out excellently.
I can honestly say I'm excited to go back and find the first three books in the series (didn't even realize it was part of a series until I finished it), and look forward to future installments if they're anywhere near as good as this.
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