The Murderer Vine: Shepard Rifkin

NY PI Joe Dunne is hired for the typical PI gigs. Then one day a man come into his office and gives him a proposition: "I want you to murder five men." The price tag is 100K a head, the men are the five individuals believed to have killed his son and the location is Mississippi. The sooner the job is completed, the sooner Dunne can retire and get fat on a beach somewhere.

So it's off to Mississippi for Dunne and Kirby, his beautiful blonde secretary. Kirby was raised in Georgia, so the accent is real and provides believability to their husband-and-wife cover when they get down south. Then it's just a matter of mixing with the locals until Dunne can get some leads. The South is very welcoming, but like their waterways, if you make too big a splash, something will bite you. And when the sheriff and a local political bigwig start appearing involved in the murders, this case may prove to be a little too much for a NY PI.

Honestly, I really didn't enjoy The Murderer Vine when I started it. Sure, it's 30 years old, but that has nothing to do with it. It just wasn't the hardboiled I was expecting, it was a NY PI running around the city, getting ready for a trip down south for the first hundred pages. I was really thinking I wasn't going to dig this at all. And then, somewhere along the way, I realized I was really caught up in the story and that I was looking forward to finishing it.

I think it was the matter-of-fact storytelling. Shepard Rifkin was not afraid to throw around the racial epithets, and I think it was doing it so bluntly in the character's dialog, coupled with the subtle signs of respect from the northern characters towards the black community that really caught me up in it. What started out as a murder mystery turned into an observation on the differences of race based on the views of the North and South and it's the personal insights of the narrator that really made the statements weigh something. A terrific book, definitely not quite what I was expecting (in a good way). One can only hope that Hard Case Crime sees fit to release more Rifkin novels in the future.

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Mass Market Paperback: 254 pages
Publisher: Leisure Books; Unabridged edition (April 29, 2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0843959614
ISBN-13: 978-0843959611