Book: And Sometimes I Wonder About You
Author: Walter Mosley
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Price: £20.00 (hardback)
Review by Angela Howell
Leonid McGill, Walter Mosley’s hardcore New York City detective, returns for the fifth time in And Sometimes I Wonder about You. Like a modern day Shaft, McGill is a charmer with women, not afraid to get his hands dirty and solves his cases.
This high quality crime novel offers a gritty insight into being a detective with a tough exterior and a heart that knows right from wrong, although it’s not acted upon at all times.
While on a train returning from Philadelphia to his hometown in NYC, having just completed a case, McGill spies an attractive woman Marella Herzog moving restlessly around the compartment. Before long she seeks out his company and claims that she is running from her fiancé, who is desperate to find her.
McGill senses trouble is just around the corner, and he’s right as a menacing man with a scowl and a sharp knife attacks them. Despite the warning signs he finds it hard to resist her, leading to an affair that ends once he solves her case.
McGill has his own woes, with his post-suicidal wife Katrina in psychiatric care. His lover Aura is unsure of their affair while his son Twill is in too deep with a Fagan-like character by the name of Jones who runs an underground ring of child criminals in NYC.
His secretary Mardi is steeped in issues of her own, and to top it all off, McGill’s absent communist father, who left him to fight in South America when he was a child, turns up out of the blue.
Meanwhile McGill, determined to crack the cases piling high on his desk, is faced with an eccentric potential client, Hiram Stent, who tries to convince him that if he finds his cousin, there is a fortune to be had. Unconvinced, McGill declines the offer only for Stent to wind up dead and his office to be broken into.
McGill has enemies on all sides, including police captain Carson Kitteridge, but he is savvy enough to also use them for his own benefit. He is friends, not just with the good guys but also the bad guys, even when they don’t trust him.
This book inspires intrigue and wonder and is definitely a page turner. With its myriad of subplots, I wondered how Mosley would successfully tie them all together without forgetting a character or creating in an implausible and vague conclusion.
Thankfully Mosley nails it. He leaves you with each character and effortlessly picks them up where he left off. You are left so full of storylines, there is no room for any more, until the next book.
If you want a crime novel that captures your imagination, then this is for you. Mosley takes you on an adventurous journey which leaves you wondering, what could possibly happen next?
After 46 books, you have to ask how Mosley keeps the words flowing, but he does. A very worthy read.