Calling all literate Rhode Islanders and Ocean State ex-pats: For a great read get thee to the bookstore (or Internet if you must) and get Bruce DeSilva’s latest Rhody-centric mystery novel “The Dread Line.” It goes on sale in September.
Believe me, you will not be disappointed. The latest in his series of whudunnits that revolves around raffish Providence newspaper investigative reporter Liam Mulligan, DeSilva has a new twist in this one. Mulligan has been fired from his job at the Providence Dispatch, a dying newspaper that resembles the Providence Journal. (DeSilva is a former ProJo scribe).
Mulligan has traded his Federal Hill tenement digs for an isolated fortress of a waterfront home on Jamestown. And he’s changed professions – Mulligan still writes for an on-line news web site (under the nom de plume of Richard Harding Davis, a long-deceased war reporter from the early 20th century who covered the Spanish-American War, the Boer War and WWI). Journalism, however, is a mere sideline for his more lucrative post-reporting pursuits of helping supervise a thriving bookmaking ring and working as a private investigator.
Once again, DeSilva captures well our cozy, parochial and tribal state in all its florid sleaze. The author has an uncanny sense of place. Indeed, the Ocean State is as much a character as the group of aging mobsters, waspy swells dwelling in oceanside mansions, cops, sketchy lawyers, bookies and reporters roiled out by DeSilva. I’ve written this before, but now more than ever, as Nixon used to say, it is apparent that DeSilva is to Rhode Island what James Lee Burke is to Louisiana.
This page-turner is the usual mélange of DeSilva’s short, peppery chapters. We go to such familiar Providence haunts as Hope’s, the former Washington Street dive tavern where pols and journalists gathered. Last call was widely ignored at Hope’s; it wasn’t unusual for the ProJo night shift to leave the bar at the grey light of dawn. Across the street was C. Blake’s, where Providence cops nursed their beers and grievances long after legal last call.
This time, DeSilva has a New England Patriots angle, a riff on the Aaron Hernandez murder trial. He also has a character who tortures dogs in rural, watery sections of Jamestown. And Mulligan latches on to a jewelry heist that he can’t let go of. When Mullligan and his private detective partner get hired by the Patriots to vet a Boston College star with some serious secrets – both real and imagined –the plot takes off.
Without giving anything away, we can safely say that Mulligan flies very close to the sun in this edition. To nearly the last chapter, the reader is left wondering whether Mulligan has drifted too far to the dark side of the law. And there are such obscure references as a minor character named Jason Licht, a take on the son of state Superior Court Judge (and former RI lieutenant governor) Richard Licht. ESPN commentator (and Brown grad) Chris Berman makes an appearance, as does the Most Hated Man in New England , NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. There is also a sensationalist TeeVe reporter named Logan Bedford, who resembles onetime Rhode Island television bottom feeder Logan Crawford.
All of this adds up to a rollicking read. All hail Vo Dielun.
