Book Review: Man With an Axe

Reviewed By: Carl Brookins - RAM

Man With an Axe     Amazon US PB Amazon Canada PB
Jon A. Jackson
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Hard Boiled   Police Procedural
Series: Fang Mulheisen # 7
1998, Grove Press, Trade Paper, 234 pages

Sometimes, when you’re a good writer, and you’ve demonstrated mastery of your craft, you can break the rules and get away with it. Here’s a hard-boiled police-procedural that is very different. Even so, the details are right, the writing is of a high order and every footfall is correct.

Detroit homicide detective Fang Mulheisen is between cases. He’s just working in the department, cleaning up things, doing the tedious, routine day to day stuff that is the bulk of most detectives’ daily order. Then he gets some weird e-mail cartoons. Then he gets some tenuous links to a case his mentor, detective Grootka, long since deceased, apparently handled off the record.

Next thing you know, an attractive young historian turns up in Mulheisen’s office asking for help with a project she’s doing. Subject of her project? Grootka. Mulheisen never believed in coincidence. There are some other characters in this novel as well, characters that are long dead. Jimmy Hoffa, for example; also some formidable musicians from Detroit’s heyday of blues and jazz music.

The structure of this novel is unusual for a hard-boiled police story. It bounces back and forth in time and Mulheisen, who is trying to reconstruct some complex events related by a man not very literate and, since he’s dead he can’t be asked for explanations (Grootka). So all in all, readers will have to pay close attention to keep track of what’s going on. If you do, the experience will be very satisfying, and you’ll get as good an explanation of what happened to Jimmy Hoffa as one could ask for.

Carl Brookins - RAM

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