Book Review: Matt Coyle's 'Doomed Legacy'

It’s nice to come across a crime story that keeps us turning pages and distracts us temporarily from the apparently unsolvable challenges of the real world, though the best thrillers resonate with contemporary significance. Such is the case with Matt Coyle’s “Doomed Legacy,” his ninth novel starring private investigator Rick Cahill. Crime series are in — a publication preference, it would seem, to judge from any number of murder mysteries that now come fully loaded with middle-aged private P.I.s, female as well as male, who manage to make it from novel to novel despite physical and psychological distress, if not near-death experiences. For some readers, series are a substitute family.

The attraction of a series for authors is revisiting a likable protagonist who needs only to be updated, leaving writers free to concentrate on crafting new plots. The danger of a series is referencing important information about the protagonist without making readers feel that they’ve missed better days in earlier novels. Coyle knows his stuff. A best-selling mystery/crime writer for years, he’s picked up just about every award and nomination there is to bestow in the field. His strength is narrative complication and suspense. “Doomed Legacy” may not be as tight, believable or nail biting as earlier books, but it still hits the right notes, even if readers expect what’s coming.

Rick, a former police officer, has been around long enough to be at a personal and professional crossroads. Battered for years (in previous novels) with injuries to the head (football, boxing, violence, especially this last) that seriously affect his emotional as well as physical health, a “Doomed Legacy” he is reluctant to tell his beloved wife, Leah, about. It’s called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy and is likely fatal, with symptoms of increasing uncontrollable rage at unexpected moments. Rick thus can be a threat to everyone near him, especially those he loves: Leah and their 14-month-old child, Krista. Rick is also fated to act on a dubious credo his dead father repeatedly recited, namely, that “Sometimes you have to do what’s right even when the law says it’s wrong.”

Rick says that once he becomes a cop, like his father, he knew that that code had always been inside him. “Nature and nurture, I was my father’s son.” The mantra gets repeated a number of times too many, but it serves to remind readers why Rick will risk his life and endanger his family to uphold the credo. It links him to his profession and to colleagues such as Sara Bhandari, who calls him at the start of the novel to express unease over a detective agency she works for. No surprise: When he agrees to meet her, it’s too late. She’s dead. The police suspect a serial rapist, whose sadistic M.O. seems to be on full display in Sara’s case. Hmmmmm … Rick goes along but skepticism’s his domain. The facts of her death coincide with her suspicions about the so-called detective agency she was looking into and wanted to discuss with him. Leveraged Investigations (the name alone dooms it) turns out to be a shell company, with Chinese overlords calling the shots.

A writer more interested in psychology might have explored the vigilante theme that drives Rick and eventually drives him apart from his beloved family. Certainly today, it would be relevant, given our country’s history of the heroic outlaw theme in westerns and the hard-boiled, often violent stance of courageous loners who take justice into their own hands when they’re faced with unyielding corrupt so-called official Justice. Especially since Coyle has Rick muse, “I worry about the evil without. And the evil within me.”

“Evil” is a strong word and his expression of it is a bit glib. We don’t believe for a minute that Rick is evil or that Coyle intends us to blame him for a disorder that therapy, antidepressants and mood stabilizers, all of which Rick has tried, don’t help. He will be seeing a neurologist, however, who perhaps will “try something new” (next novel?). He perseveres in his investigation, with the assistance of an old trusted buddy P.I. Moira, with whom he engages in smart-alecky exchanges (next novel?) and the devotion of his beloved dog, Midnight, at his back. So curl up and have a likely fast, entertaining read.