jorn's Full Review: George V. Higgins - At End of Day: A Novel of Susp...
I have enormous respect for the late George V Higgins' craftsmanship.
His recent novels have followed a characteristic pattern, treating one character per chapter, letting each character tell their life story in their own words, slowly circling a central mystery that's resolved in the last chapters, in the form of some subtle, highlevel, whitecollar/political scam that Higgins vividly exposes.
His last novel-- At End of Day-- has all these characteristics except the last: after 380 pages of circling, Higgins rolls up the carpet and says goodbye, without ever getting to the mystery!
So I have to imagine that he picked the theme-- cops using hoods to spy on other hoods, based on a real recent scandal in Boston-- and did a lot of research, looking for a mystery he could build the story around... but after some period of time he just gave up the search, maybe realizing this theme didn't fit his normal pattern, and wrote up his background material all on its own.
You'd expect, given the theme, that the cops would get compromised by their intimacy with the hoods, and the climax would be the scandal breaking-- and in fact, there is a scene where a cop (FBI, actually) takes a large loan from a top hood. But this is literally in the last ten pages of the book, and leads exactly nowhere!
Higgins stoops to the cheesy trick of tying up the plot's loose ends in a short epilog, and really that's where the entire plot is. The other 380 pages are all exposition and setup!
Given Higgins's craftsmanship, this book will still give pleasure to his fans, but it's certainly not the place for a newcomer to start. There's one hood-- a loanshark we see terrorizing people who haven't paid up-- who's so much more vivid than the rest that you have to wish he'd gotten a book to himself. But Higgins no doubt felt he'd already written that book many times, starting with his 1972 classic, 'Friends of Eddie Coyle'.
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