Monday, March 3, 2014

Swann's Last Song (Henry Swann) by Charles Salzberg

This one starts standard enough... A skip tracer is hired by a good-looking woman with a lot of cash to track down her missing husbands. The twist comes when said husband is found dead pretty early in the narrative. What follows is more of an investigation in who this man was than a murder investigation. It takes the skip tracer (Swann) from New York to LA to Berlin.
Swann isn't the toughest or most heroic of hardboiled eyes, but the sticks with the job and his first-person voice is pretty much what we all expect and like of the genre.
With each chapter you get the feeling this isn't as standard a mystery as you at first think. It borders the more literary genre and the end is so very surprising a lot of people will not like it. In fact, the author added an alternative ending and an explanation of the history behind it.
Well-writing and surprising... BUT I can imagine the ending might not be to your liking. I found it a refreshing change...
And no, I don't do spoilers here so you will need to read the book to find out what I'm talking about!

No comments: