CATALINA EDDY: A Novel in Three Decades

Fiction

Grit and wit

CATALINA EDDY
A Novel in Three Decades
By Daniel Pyne
480 pp. Blue Rider Press

Reviewed by Eric Petersen

Novelist and screenwriter Daniel Pyne is back with a collection of three very different yet loosely connected crime novellas, set in Southern California thirty years apart from each other, all of them focused on murder cases and tied together by characters wounded by regret and longing for atonement.

The first novella, The Big Empty, opens in Hollywood, circa 1954, at the apex of the Cold War and the Red Scare. Army veteran turned hard-boiled detective Rylan Lovely literally walks into the hardest case he’s ever worked – the murder of his estranged wife Isla, whom he’d left several years earlier.

Lovely blames himself for the failure of their marriage, even though Isla had an affair with his best friend. Her murder is punctuated by the invention of the H-bomb, which has ratcheted up Cold War tensions to a whole new level.

Racked with guilt and determined to nail Isla’s killer, Lovely’s investigation draws him into a deadly web of espionage centered on an experimental fuel for intercontinental ballistic missiles and bomber planes that could determine the winner of the Cold War and the fate of the world…

Losertown, the second novella, takes place in the coked-up 1980s. Assistant U.S. Attorney Gil Kirby has been made an unofficial general in then-President Ronald Reagan’s war on illegal drugs. His new boss, a younger woman named Sabrina Colter, is a Reagan appointee and a ferocious arch-conservative.

To Colter, who’s like “somebody’s kid sister crossed with a poisonous snake,” human lives on the wrong side of the war on drugs are expendable and cheap – even innocent lives. Determined to win the war by any means necessary, all she’s interested in is getting results, be they convictions or killings.

Gil Kirby, a talented prosecutor, has no problem getting results in court, but he’s deeply troubled by his new boss’s approach to their jobs. She also has a hidden agenda, which is taking out Democrats in positions of power, something Kirby finds out when she orders him to blackmail an ex-drug dealer into participating in a shady sting operation on the mayor of San Diego.

Kirby soon realizes that Sabrina Colter is just as much a psychopath as the drug traffickers they’re trying to stop, with no feelings for the killings on both sides of her idol Reagan’s futile, unwinnable war on drugs. When his girlfriend, FBI Agent Tina Z., is needlessly killed in the line of duty during a shootout, a devastated Kirby must decide which he values more – his job or his self respect…

Finally, we have Portuguese Bend, set in present-day Long Beach. Eccentric crime scene photographer Finn Miller is fascinated by the images he captures. The novella opens with Finn working a murder scene, as Willa Ko, an American soldier like her father, has been charged with gunning down her Korean-American husband while their little girls played in another room.

That night at a bar, Finn is goaded by a friend into trying to pick up a gorgeous, tipsy redhead who just had a fight with her boyfriend – the homicide detective from the crime scene – and is drinking her sorrows away. To Finn’s surprise, she seems to like him.

The girl, who identifies herself only as Riley, agrees to go home with him. She’s impressed by his loft and his pictures, which include copies of crime-scene photos that he’s not supposed to keep because of confidentiality laws. But the images are so compelling, he can’t resist them.

After he and Riley have a one-night stand, Finn wakes up alone, realizing that he’ll probably never see her again – and that he’s in love with her. When an undercover policewoman is ambushed and shot in the line of duty, Finn is called in to photograph the scene, and is stunned to discover that the policewoman is Riley.

She survives, but her legs are paralyzed in the shooting. After an awkward reunion, Finn determines to help Riley rebuild her life. When she tells him that she knows Willa Ko didn’t kill her husband – a philandering, drug-dealing scumbag – they team up to solve the crime.

What they don’t know is that the murderous, drug-dealing rogue cop who killed Willa’s husband and framed her has been watching their every move…

Catalina Eddy is a haunting, unforgettable masterpiece of noir seasoned with grit and wit. Daniel Pyne’s crackling, often surreal prose is more visual than a screenplay. Highly recommended to crime thriller fans!

Eric Petersen is an administrator and blogmaster for the Internet Writing Workshop, an international, online writer’s group run out of Penn State University. You can reach him by e-mail at EricPetersen1970@hotmail.com