Review: The Peripheral Son by Dorien Grey

The Peripheral Son is the fourteenth book in a long running series of mystery novels (the first book The Butcher's Son was published over 10 years ago - find a whole list of the books here) featuring PI Dick Hardesty.  Now normally I won't join a series so late on as I tend to break out in a cold sweat when I read a series out of order. However, I was asked to review the book and I found that because the focus is very definitely on solving the mystery, you don't really need to know what happens in the previous books. I even managed to pick up a lot of clues about Dick, his relationship with Jonathan and his adopted son Joshua, and his vast network of gay friends quite easily - even if I got a little confused as to who all the gay friends were.  My only annoyance was that certain specifics about Dick such as where he lives, his looks and age were never mentioned (presumably because all that stuff is covered in earlier books) and I struggled with picturing him.  Not that it's strictly necessary to have a image of Dick, especially as the books are written in the first person, but it would have been nice to know for certain that he was in his forties, rather than having to make an assumption that he was.

In this book the mystery revolves around a missing person - Victor Koseva.  Dick is hired to find out where Victor is and spends time looking for him.  When Victor turns up dead at a local gay cruising spot, the death looks accidental, but there are things that don't add up for Dick. Dick's client asks that he continues the investigation, and Dick finds himself immersed in the murky world of shady business deals in construction, and drug taking in the boxing world.

The story is set in the 1980's (again no specific date), when useful tools for a PI, like the internet and the mobile phone, had not yet been invented.  As such, Dick spends an awful lot of time on the telephone, in the library, meeting people and researching  the validity of what people tell him.  Each conversation he has with people is painstakingly recreated so that the reader knows everything that Dick finds out.  Alongside these conversations we have the internal dialogue of Dick who mulls over various clues, options and scenarios.  On one hand this meant that the book contained an incredible amount of detail, but it also had the effect that the plotting was very slow at times.  This meant that, at least for me, this wasn't a book I could read all in one go.  It was very interesting and I was curious as to how the mystery was going to work out, but I wasn't riveted by the book.  I put it down a couple of times and read something else before coming back to the book.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as I definitely wanted to finish the book because the mystery had caught my attention, just that those looking for lots of action and swift pacing may be disappointed with this dialogue heavy book.

The mystery itself was full of twists and turns and misdirections. I guessed whodunit by about 3/4 of the way through, which is probably when the really obvious clues were being given to the reader!  One thing I really liked about the mystery was that it showed the many brick walls that Dick stumbles into.  Towards the end of the book Dick is incredibly frustrated at how little he has in terms of concrete evidence in his case, and I felt just as frustrated as he did!  It was interesting to read a mystery where the clues didn't follow on in a nice linear pattern, and also for us to see some surprises and misconceptions for Dick.  It was all rather clever.

There's no romance in this book, unless you count the four year relationship Dick has with his partner Jonathan.  There's a slight sub-plot involving Joshua who is starting school and all the organising that goes along with that.  We also get glimpses into Dick's past as a bit of a gay playboy which made me smile because he's such a responsible family man now, even if he still loves the much alluded to 'games' that he and Jonathan get up to in the privacy of their bedroom.

Overall, if you are a fan of mystery novels then this will be a good book to pick up.  The eighties setting is unusual but don't expect a lot of references to the time period (except to see how much harder life was without the internet).  Even the AIDS epidemic is only mentioned briefly because Dick and nearly all his friends are in long-term monogamous relationships and therefore it didn't affect them too greatly - at least not in this book, it may have been given more of a focus in earlier books in the series.  I liked Dick a great deal and found his dogged and fairly optimistic approach to his job and life in general very sympathetic.  I'd recommend The Peripheral Son with a grade of 'Very Good' and would certainly consider reading further books in this series.

Buy this book HERE.