Dead Low Tide (Dan Kardon Mysteries) [Mass Market Paperback]

Katz's amateur detective Dan Kardon is a Brookline lawyer who has detached himself from life. The tragic deaths of his kid sister and his fiancee have rendered him almost incapable of close social interaction, a dysthymia eased somewhat by his relationship with Anne and Frank and their nineteen-year-old ward Aaron Winters. While riding their bicycles through the Buzzards Bay town of Wettamesett, young Aaron challenges Kardon to keep up with him. The rush of adrenaline Kardon gets from the effort momentarily lifts him from his low-grade depression. And when Aaron leads him to a secret place, a used tire dump in the woods, Kardon describes it in terms of heightened observation:

"A huge, undulating ridge of black doughnuts rose to fifty feet, and even higher in places, enough to have dwarfed a five-story building;.. The black pile shimmered just as I imagined Mount St. Helens had while its lava fields congealed... The edges and lines of the pile wavered, giving the pile the aspect of an hallucination. But that knowledge, and the heat of the day, didn't prevent me from shivering as I gazed at the dark contours in front of me."

That sense of looming blackness comes to permeate the story, as Aaron is soon thereafter found shot to death not far from the tire pile. Kardon's dissatisfaction with his life reconfigures itself into a full-blown obsession to find Aaron's killer, a manic drive that not even two bashes on the head, a frame-up on drug charges, and a hired killer's attempt to reduce him to a pile of Cape Hatteras roadkill can halt.

Along the way, Kardon meets and describes a fascinating cast of characters. Indeed, this leads to one of the few senses of dissatisfaction with the book: the peripheral characters, from a North Carolina female cop to Kardon's state trooper basketball pal, to his handicapped downstairs neighbor, a ten-year-old boy whose playful propensity for switching the locations of various household items winds up saving Kardon's life. Unlike the average mystery novel where each of these would typically be represented by a cardboard cutout, the problem here is that each is drawn too well - the fullness of their personalities makes the reader want more. This is especially true of the female characters, all of whom are endowed with both a realism and a sympathy that makes them intriguing. The same internal anguish that causes Kardon to pursue Aaron's killers so determinedly also leads to his fear of intimacy. Though always civil, he maintains an invisible shield of barbed witticisms and nebulous Shakespearian quotes. This tends to keep all those fascinating characters at arm's length, until the adrenaline of a hair's-breadth survival and the impossible safety of a New England-North Carolina romance cause him finally to lower his guard.

A first novel whose major flaw is that it leaves the reader wanting more is surely a good omen. Katz's familiarity with, and accurate descriptions of, Eastern Massachusetts locations like Buzzards Bay, the Southeast Expressway, or the state offices at One Ashburton Place ("In addition to people, mice work in the building. I should know. I lost countless packages of junk food to them when I worked in the Attorney General's office.") suggests that he's the latest in the long line of distinguished mystery writers from New England. If solving Aaron's murder helps Dan Kardon get over his intimacy avoidance, there's a cast of wonderful characters to be explored.