Never Quite Dead

In David Kyle, Shubin has created an everyman detective. Adopting his deceased father's independent investigation of a young boy's murder, Kyle is initially driven by the guilt he feels for never taking interest in his old man's career-spanning passion for the case. Before long, though, the pursuit for the truth grabs hold of Kyle the way it did his father. Guided more by his heart and instinct than true investigative know-how, Kyle learns all he can of the boy and his mother but can't piece together the murder until the antagonists break down and slip up at book's end. With Kyle, Shubin gives us a compassionate hero in a cold world during a cold time. Shubin excels in his depictions of this setting. He elegantly speaks of the horror in choosing the easy path in life, the pain of a ravaged conscience, what it means to lose a loved one, and the loneliness of a pursuit that only the pursuer understands.With a tragic enough plot, frighteningly conscience-ravaged antagonists, a relatable hero in David Kyle, and a terrifying climax, Never Quite Dead works as a novel. It is, in fact, a good book. As a murder mystery, it takes a misstep, though. Shubin parallels Kyle's story with the story of the party that is responsible for the murder. However, clues are not presented in a linear fashion and the facts of the murder do not become increasingly apparent throughout the story. Three-quarters of the way through the book, the reader's knowledge of what happened that night is limited to what he/she knew in the first fifty pages of the book. Until final confessions, in fact, the reader knows only which characters are, in some vague way, involved in the death of the boy. Never Quite Dead is at once cold and desolate and again passionate and reaffirming. Ultimately, it is a gratifying read.