The Evil Men Do

January 1, 2020
Having survived his tempestuous debut, P.T. Marsh, of Georgia's Mason Falls Police Department, is back for more--including some residue from that first case that just won't go away. Dispatched like an errand boy to wealthy real estate mogul Ennis Fultz's home to find out why he hasn't joined his bridge buddies, Mayor Stems and interim police chief Jeff Pernacek, for their monthly game, Marsh and his partner, Remy Morgan, find Fultz dead in his bed. It turns out that his passing, devoutly longed for by so many of the people he'd crushed or outwitted on his way to the top, was helped along by the strategic dose of nitrogen somebody substituted for the oxygen he inhaled regularly, especially when he was expecting particular demands on his virility. Marsh and Morgan quickly focus on two candidates who might have made those demands: Suzy Kang, a recent visitor who was so eager to cover any traces that she'd been to Fultz's house that she sold the car she'd driven there, and Connie Fultz, the victim's ex-wife and perhaps his current lover, who acidly swats them away and tells them: "Look for some little gal who's into bondage." McMahon excels in sweating the procedural details of the investigation, which take the partners from a search for Suzy Kang and that missing car to a not-so-accidental car crash that's evidently targeted a young girl who has no idea she's implicated in the case. But he's set his sights higher, taking in everything from a civil suit the relatives of the perp Marsh shot in The Good Detective (2019) have launched against him to a possible conspiracy behind the deaths of his deeply grieved wife and son, all of it larded with Georgia attitude and truisms, a few of which rise to eloquence ("I wasn't good at faith. I was good at proof"). As tangled and turbulent as the hero's nightmares, and that's saying quite a bit.

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January 13, 2020
In McMahon’s disappointing sequel to 2019’s The Good Detective, Mason Falls, Ga., homicide detective P.T. Marsh investigates the suspicious death of ruthless, aging real estate magnate Ennis Fultz, whose oxygen tank appears to have malfunctioned. Suspects in what turns into a murder case include a lover who may be a dominatrix, irate farmers who lost their land because of Fultz, and a drug-addicted truck driver who delivered oxygen to Fultz. Meanwhile, Marsh must also deal with an accident that almost killed his father-in-law and put the man in a coma. A stock emotionally wounded detective, Marsh grieves for his wife and son, who died in an unsolved hit-and-run, and laments various bad decisions he’s made involving alcohol and destructive relationships. Evocative descriptions are a plus (“low-lying creeping jenny grew horizontally, moving through the scrub like a water moccasin”), but the story line has a tired, formulaic feel to it. McMahon needs to find a more original plot next time to match his assured prose. Author tour. Agent: Marly Rusoff, Marly Rusoff Literary.

Starred review from February 15, 2020
Police detective P. T. Marsh of Mason Falls, Georgia, is a complex, fallible human being. He's successful at his work until his desire to do what he sees as right kicks into rage, leading to his being charged with using excessive force in apprehending a murder suspect. He's still grieving the presumably accidental deaths of his wife and young son 17 months earlier, and his feelings may be dooming his budding relationship with medical examiner Sarah Raines. And, like all good detectives, he's obsessive about his cases. So when autopsy results show that widely disliked real-estate magnate Ennis Fultz died from nitrogen poisoning after someone tampered with his home oxygen tank, Marsh and his partner, Remy Morgan, dig deeply. Two leads seem promising?the escort who had weekly trysts with Fultz and the driver from the chemical company who delivered the oxygen tanks?but both fall apart with further investigation. Following the money leads the detectives to something much bigger, with links that become personal to Marsh, who risks everything for what he sees as justice for himself and those he loves. A compelling, character-driven sequel to McMahon's stunning debut, The Good Detective (2019), this firmly establishes the author as a force in crime fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)