I’m willing to bet that not many private investigators out there, real or fictional, are slam poets. Or work at newsstands. Or have imaginary conversations with deceased former residents of their apartment. Probably not any, except for Jo Epstein, Joyce Yarrow’s protagonist in Ask the Dead. After selling her detective agency in L.A., Jo is in the middle of transitioning to a literary career in New York when she is asked to take a case that, on the face of it, looks typical enough—a young black photographer with a drug record, accused of manslaughter in the knifing death of a gang banger. But the mystery surrounding Gabriel Johnson quickly deepens, as Epstein steps into a gritty New York street world of halfway houses, social workers, street artists and police. Soon she finds herself in the middle of a maelstrom of crime—gang slayings, drug running, and weapons dealing, just for starters. There’s even an old fashioned, Hollywood-style kidnap/ransom adventure, and a subplot surrounding a Muslim man who may have been “disappeared” by the US government.
The NYPD officer on the case, Hasim Saleh, has no wish to collaborate with a PI, but he and Epstein slowly learn to trust—and respect—one another as they share leads on the case. And there are plenty of those, along with a glittering array of suspicious characters, a couple of whom are attracted to our lonely investigator. As though she doesn’t have enough on her hands, Jo begins digging into the background of the former tenant in her apartment, the bathtub suicide with whom she holds one-sided conversations.
If all this seems a bit much—well, perhaps it is. Yarrow doesn’t do as much etching of character or scene in her debut novel as she does in her shorter fiction (some of her stories have appeared in Whistling Shade). And subtleties of theme tend to get drowned out in the noise of action. But they’re there, if you listen closely—particularly the motif of transition, of becoming. A street kid trying to make it as a photographer. A sleuth with aspirations to be a writer. And many others, from anarchists to cops, trying to climb out of the cement bunkers that poverty, race, religion, or chance have placed them in. Ask the Dead has plenty of adrenaline, but it never lets you forget where it came from—the hard back streets of New York.
- Joel Van Valin