Our Review
A Gritty and Authentic Urban Thriller
A Murder of Honor marks my first encounter with veteran thriller writer Robert Andrews. I hope it won't be my last. The opening volume in a projected series, A Murder of Honor is a gritty, authentic police procedural that vividly evokes the blighted landscape of Washington, DC, and uses a complex murder investigation to illustrate, and comment on, the declining quality of modern urban life.
The story begins with the apparent drive-by shooting of Father Robert O'Brien, a Catholic priest and former civil rights activist who has spent the last several years ministering to Washington's homeless. The case, which appears to be hopelessly unsolvable, is handed, as a form of punishment, to Frank Kearney and Jose Phelps, world-weary homicide veterans with a knack for alienating their superior officers. Between them, Kearney and Phelps have spent more than 50 years on the Metropolitan Police Force. They know they've been stuck with an impossible assignment, but they give it their professional best. And in the process, they manage to come up with some unanticipated results.
Early in their investigation, the detectives conclude that O'Brien's death was no mere act of random urban violence. To begin with, a search of O'Brien's quarters unearths a sizeable amount of hidden cash, together with a collection of personal ads indicating a possible connection with the District's gay community. The subsequent search for the killer's car leads to a nearby salvage yard, and to the gruesome discovery of two more bodies caught and crushed in an automobile compactor. When the bullets found in one of the mangled bodies match the bullets found in Father O'Brien, the case assumes a new, and unexpected, dimension.
As events unfold and bodies continue to accumulate, Kearney and Phelps find themselves caught up in a multilayered conspiracy involving Colombian drug lords, professional assassins, small-time hustlers, computer hackers, and corrupt government officials. The novel ends with an explosive showdown in the Washington projects, in the course of which the nature of that conspiracy is finally and fully revealed.
A Murder of Honor is a tightly written, expertly constructed thriller that has much to say about life in our cities in the closing years of the 20th century. In Frank Kearney and Jose Phelps, Andrews has created a pair of sympathetic, wholly realistic heroes: aging, sometimes angry men who fight the good fight in a world that is deteriorating before their eyes. Together, they provide this novel with its human and dramatic center. I look forward to encountering them again.
--Bill Sheehan
Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).
