The Last Line by Robert Dugoni
I would like to thank Morgan from Pitchlit for an advance copy of this short story in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Amazon Original Stories
Published – Out Now
Price – £1.99 kindle eBook
His old life in the rearview, Del Castigliano has left Wisconsin to work homicide for the Seattle PD. Breaking him in is veteran detective Moss Gunderson, and he’s handing Del a big catch: the bodies of two unidentified men fished from Lake Union. It’s a major opportunity for the new detective, and Del runs with it, chasing every lead—to every dead end. Despite the help of another section rookie, Vic Fazzio, Del is going nowhere fast. Until one shotgun theory looks to be dead right: the victims are casualties of a drug smuggling operation. But critical information is missing—or purposely hidden. It’s forcing Del into a crisis of character and duty that not even the people he trusts can help him resolve.
Crime short stories have a long history. In the days of Conan Doyle they’re all about logic puzzles making the impossible possible; with Christie the guessing of the likely suspects with motive and as crime evolves today perhaps also the ability to tell wider tales about today’s social issues. In Robert Dugoni’s great short story The Last Line we get a mystery wrapped in a darker blanket of secrets set in the freezing winter of Seattle.
I’ve not read any of Dugoni’s Tracy Crosswhite novels so went in literally cold, but this tale set in the 1990s made me want to read more and the first book in the main series has been bought already. What I enjoyed about this is it’s a tale that very quickly goes from new detective on the block to a darker and in some ways bleaker tale of someone arriving in a city where many secrets live.
Helping achieve this is Del a bright but personally bruised new Detective seeking a fresh start. He comes across as honest and bright and initially the group he joins seems welcoming but the potential murder/drowning of two unnamed men seems a little too convenient to wrap up. We see him meet another officer Vic Fazzio and they bond with a common sense of doing the right thing and also a shared Italian american upbringings. This initial friendship gives some warmth in a story that is often cold not just through Dugoni’s great description of Seattle in a shivering winter but the wider story where it suddenly feels we are in deeper waters as the facts get unearthed by Del’s patient examination of witnesses and clues. That feeling in particular really makes the story work and always impressed when a crime author also turns the attend to the issue of the police service itself not always making a place better.
This made a perfect taster for the quality of Dugoni’s writing and I’ll be very interested to see what else I can find in this series and what happened next to this interesting duo of detectives!
