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The Keeper is an engaging read
Book Review
By Derryll White
Lescroart, John (2014). The Keeper.
“Woman’s virtue is man’s greatest invention.” – Cornelia Otis Skinner.
Dismas Hardy and recently retired San Francisco Police Homicide detective Abe Glitsky, Lescroart favourites, are the major characters in this novel. Glitsky carries the primary workload. It is interesting to watch John Lescroart grow his characters over time.
Abe Glitsky had many supporting roles in Lescroart’s impressive list of novels. Now, instead of killing him off the author has given him a new life, retired from the SFPD and accepted as an investigator in the District Attorney’s office.
In the transition of Glitsky’s work life the author has some interesting things to say about retirement. Lescroart points out that a passionate individual, invested in his career, does not put everything in park happily. There has to be outlets, or boredom and death.
The Skinner quote is very apt and the author explores it fully. This is a very good read, with Lescroart’s visually glowing San Francisco providing the backdrop for Glitsky’s impassioned transition from work to quiet rest and back to work. The plot is tight and only the most astute of readers will get to the conclusion before the author reveals it.
I found the exposé of the U.S. legal system interesting, and the whole of the work engaging. ‘The Keeper’ is another really good read from John Lescroart.
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Excerpts from the novel:
SAN FRANCISCO – … JaMorris and Abby knocked at the front door of the Dunne home on Guerrero Street in the Mission District. It was a three-story structure on its own lot that gave the impression of having been the project of several shabbily genteel architects over its 30 years of life. Odd angles jutted from corners and roofs; the entire second floor seemed to float behind plate-glass windows; a fountain splashed over perennial reeds into a koi pond in the half-covered courtyard that doubled as the welcoming lobby on the first floor.
Exposing a fairly common vein in San Francisco’s über-liberal culture, some past owners (or perhaps the Dunnes themselves) had spent serious money in an effort to render the home aggressively proletarian.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY’s INVESTIGATOR – Glitsky didn’t know whether to blame it on the six months he’d spent being a civilian, or on his disgust with the ease with which law enforcement professionals could and did game the system, but he felt that the only progress made in any of these investigations had been because he’d followed his own path, not necessarily the rules of procedure about which he’d always been so punctilious, and which sworn officers were supposed to follow.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
