Mario Balzic, retired police chief of Rocksburg Pennsylvania, swaps his service uniform for the shirt and tie of the private cop, trading his former blue-collar beat for a new white-collar clientele. There's been a burglary at the local gun shop, and Balzic must track down the missing arsenal. Stolen guns mean trouble, and under Balzic's dogged sleuthing the said trouble takes the form of a corrupt married politico cheating with a stripper; a police chief a couple of towns over hungry for the influence a little improved firepower can buy; a deli owner known as the Fat Buddha who mixes racketeering with the cold cuts and the gangsters hapless nephew, framed for selling porn and drugs.
Suddenly Balzic is brought low by a cardiac episode. This personal crisis combines with an equally sudden murder to turn a solitary job into a singular mission: to stay alive, at least long enough to crack one more case...
'Terrific...one of contemporary American literature's great masters of dialogue '
- Washington Post
'a bravura bit of writing, maybe the best of a fine series'
- Michael Carlson, Crime Time [read the full review]
Mario Balzic has retired as police chief of Rockburg, Pennsylvania. He's working part-time as an insurance investigator, and, while investigating a theft from a gun shop, he has a 'cardiac episode'. As he recovers, and pursues his investigation, he finds that he is no longer in a position to accomplish everything he thinks should be accomplished, and he has to come to terms with that.
Oh, you think, another character dealing with age, and as far as that thought goes, you would be right. But Blood Mud is also about the way times have changed, the way our profit- and media-driven society has let the corruptions which always existed but were kept in check by unwritten laws and common agreement, simply take over and do what they will. In that it reminds me of George Higgins' A Change of Gravity, although Constantine's focus is more intensely personal than Higgins'.
Constantine makes Balzic face the very real fear of aging and death, and the key to the novel is the way he has to adjust both to his own mortality and its effect on the rest of his family, maybe for the first time in his life. The various strands of the theft, which lead to murder, are resolved (in a fashion) but the point is made clearly that their resolution is somehow less important to the life of a man, even a retired police chief, than his coming to terms with himself. It's a bravura bit of writing, maybe the best of a fine series.
Michael Carlson, Crime Time
'Balzic is one of the great characters of contemporary fiction'
- Boston Globe
'terst'
- jem, tester mag [read the full review]