So I'm getting ready to meet Donald Westlake when he and his author wife Abby Adams come here in August, and in the meantime I'm reading as many of his books as I can fit in. Sometimes it's re-reading; more often, as with this Kind of Love, Kinds of Death, written under his early pen name Tucker Coe (1966, reprinted by Five Star, 2000), I'm making fresh discoveries. And this warm voice is amazingly different from the crisp funny one of Westlake's John Dortmunder series.
Westlake's introduction to this reprint, the first in his Mitch Tobin series, warns that there are only five in the series – because the whole point of it is the woundedness of Tobin, and as an author you can't go on with that wound forever, but if you heal it, you've lost the point to the series. So each book is a gem, a polished treasure of deceptively simple writing that packs a huge punch. In this first one, Tobin – a disgraced cop with a broken heart and a serious case of depression – takes on a job for a mob figure. He does this without seriously compromising his ethics and solves the case. But the struggle involves love, loyalties, and violence, and I couldn't put the book down. Lucky it's only 200 pages, or there would have been serious long-term disruptions in meal prep for my household…
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