The Night Monster: A Novel of Suspense (Jack Carpenter)

Eighteen years ago when Jack Carpenter was only a kid cop he answered a domestic violence call and didn't ask for back up. He thought he was up for the job. He was not. And it was not a domestic violence case, it was an abduction. A young woman was being taking by a three hundred pound giant of a man who tossed jack aside as if he weighed nothing at all. Since then he's been thrown off the force because of a police brutality charge and now he is a private investigator who specializes in finding missing children. He gets a call from his basketball playing daughter, who tells him she thinks someone is stalking the team. He responds, confronts the stalker, a filthy mouse of a man named Mouse. The stalker has a pal, the same giant who'd gotten the better of Jack so long ago and again he gets the better of him, abducting Sara Long, one of his daughter's teammates. He is determined to get the girl back and with his faithful Australian Shepherd Buster he sets out on the trail of the kidnappers in this thriller that is so packed full with action that it's almost too hard to take in. Just when you think Swain is about to let up, something else happens. I just can't believe how good James Swain is. This book is doggone good. So is Buster, who provides a bit of comedic relief among all the tension. If the words, "I couldn't put it down" ever applied to a book, they apply to this one.

I first read Swain's "Tony Valentine" series with mixed feelings. Then the "Jack Carpenter" series came along with "Midnight Rambler" and "The Night Stalker" which again seemed OK somewhat interesting novels. But with "The Night Monster", Swain (and Carpenter) have hit the target. Wow! This effort was fast-paced--sometimes, breathlessly so--with a strong plot filled with mystery and suspense that didn't approach the boundaries of credulity until Jack's arrival in the weird inhospitable town of Chatham and wow, the secrets that burg had hidden will cause the reader to gasp for air. After being kicked off the force where he was the head of the Broward County Missing Persons Unit, Jack Carpenter is now a PI who specializes in missing persons cases and often teams with his old police unit now led by Detective Candice Burrell, a friend and protegee. In "The Night Monster", Carpenter is present when a college basketball teammate and friend of his daughter, Jessie, is kidnapped from a game site and in his attempts to foil the abduction, he is confronted by a giant of a man who brings back sour memeories of Jack losing a kidnapping victim to the same giant 18 years earlier when he was a young cop. Jack Carpenter takes every abduction personally but this one which came so close to his own daughter crosses even his line for a personal vendetta. He begins a desperate race to save Jessie's friend, Sara Long, before the trail turns cold. Along the way, he is helped and hampered by Sara's wealthy father, Detective Burrell, FBI Agent Linderman, and, of course, his friend and partner, Buster the dog...maybe the greatest recurring pooch in suspense literature. As Jack approaches the truth of who the serial kidnappers are and what they do with the victims, he and Linderman end up in the aforementioned sleepy town of Chatham which has secrets that will leave many readers cringing as they are revealed. As usual, Swain does a good job of fleshing out his characters and in this case, the reader is swept along with the investigation as much for the hoped release of the kidnapped woman as for the come-uppance to the ugly perpetrators. A special treat is a cameo by Tony Valentine that brings both of Swain's signature characters together for the first time. As usual in a Swain novel, there is a solving of a missing kid or person early on in the story (and often another later) that serve to establish both Swain's and Carpenter's credentials as experts in this niche of law enforcement. I highly recommend this can't-put-it-down effort!

Curiously, I hadn't remembered reading James Swain before. However, The casino sequence early in the book reminded me of a book I'd read and relished a few years ago. With a little checing, I discovered that the book I remembered was a Tony Valentine book.Anyway, this is a very fast paced novel that has you caring about the characters including the kidnap victimThe ending in a small eerily hostile small Florida community might strain your credibility a bit, and yet I found it believable. There is one loose end at the story's conclusion which I suspect and hope will be taken up and tied up in a future novel. be that as it may, this is a book which deserves to be on the same shelf as books by James Lee Burke and Michael Connelly.

Yes, you will be up all night finishing this book if you plan on starting it any time after 8pm. So be forewarned. From the opening chapter, with the search for a missing elementary school child, the story burns from one moment to the next. Admittedly, the main character's set up is a cliche - the ex-cop turned private eye with a laser-focus on his expertise (in this case, finding missing kids). But as John Gardner once wrote, All American fiction boils down to one of two plot lines - man rides into town or man rides out of town - it's what the author does with that story that counts. And boy does James Swain deliver. Once you read that first bit of chapter 3 as the main character, Jack Carpenter, is searching for a missing boy, you know this is not your typical hard-boiled ex-cop story: "Water has a magical effect on autistic children. It calls to them like a siren's song. I found this out...." This is not your standard cliched ex-cop whose life is on a downward slope; he's got good parts of his life (his relationship with his daughter) and some not so good (his relationship with his estranged wife). Throughout the story, Jack tries to reclaim his life. Sometimes it works and sometimes, well the typical "Hollywood story-telling" does not appear, making his frustrations and experiences much more real (like when Jack tries to buy his old house). The story is fantastically paced, the writing is well done, and the unique twists will definitely catch you a bit off guard. Just an excellent, suspenseful mystery, and extremely well worth your time. I'd not read any of James Swain's books before this; now I'll be reading them all.