The Fashionable P.I.

The Fashionable P.I. is Rida Allen's 2002 mystery debut, the first Mac Sullivan Boston PI novel. Mac is a former Boston detective who left the BPD after a contested case and now works private out of a Newbury Street office. The case that launches the series is the death of a Newbury Street boutique owner that everyone (the family, the police, the insurance company) wants to call accidental. Mac is the only one who does not buy it.

Allen writes the Boston procedural with real local texture. The Newbury Street and Back Bay material is observed rather than imagined; the small-business politics of the boutique world are handled with the kind of attention most mid-list mystery debuts skip. Mac is a fully realized first-person PI narrator (more in the Sue Grafton register than the Robert Crais one), and the supporting cast (Mac's former BPD partner, a fashion-industry consultant, a difficult client) carries weight.

Recommended for fans of contemporary American PI fiction (Sara Paretsky's V. I. Warshawski, Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone), and for readers looking for books like The Fashionable P.I. in the Boston-set procedural tradition. Four solid stars and an underread series worth following.