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Fall Guy is one of the Carol Lea Benjamin standalone novels outside her long Rachel Alexander dog-mystery series, with the prose discipline she developed in those books applied to a more conventional crime thriller form. The plot involves a case the protagonist takes on against her better judgment and the gradual accumulation of personal cost as the investigation goes deeper than she had expected.
Benjamin's strength in Fall Guy is the careful interior work. The narrator's voice carries the kind of observational rigor that her dog-mystery sequence has been delivering across a decade. The crime plot is competent. Fans of the Rachel Alexander novels who want to see Benjamin's voice in a non-dog register will find the book genuinely interesting. Fans of S. J. Rozan's Lydia Chin novels or Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski series will recognize the careful contemporary-PI literary register.
The book is shorter than the Rachel Alexander entries and resolves cleanly.
Three stars. A pleasant standalone. The Fall Guy Carol Lea Benjamin novel works best for readers already familiar with her dog-mystery sequence. New Benjamin readers should start with This Dog for Hire.
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