I reviewed Tom Lowe’s first Sean O’Brien mystery, A False Dawn, a while back. I liked the writing (though a copy editor might have been profitably employed) as well as the characters, but felt the story was weakly constructed and fell apart toward the end. My report on the second book in the series, The 24th Letter, is that the storytelling has improved, but I still wonder that St. Martin’s Press would have purchased the manuscript. Author Lowe shows substantial progress in his craftsmanship, but he’s still writing at a high amateur level, in my opinion.

This time out, retired Miami police detective Sean O’Brien is contacted by an old friend, a Catholic priest. The priest tells him he has been told by a prisoner—who was recently wounded by a sniper while on the way to testify in a drug trial—that a man O’Brien himself put on death row for the murder of his girlfriend is in fact innocent. The prisoner will soon give the priest a written confession, detailing where vital evidence is hidden.

But soon both the prisoner and the priest have been murdered, and O’Brien, conscience-stricken that he might bear responsibility for the execution of an innocent man—works against the clock to unravel a convoluted mystery before the date of execution.

Convoluted indeed. As I’ve written before, there’s a difference between plausibility in fiction and plausibility in a movie, and this story reads more like a movie script than a novel. The central puzzle involves the hoary set piece of a dying man writing a clue in his own blood. But it doesn’t stop there. The clue itself is an abstruse riddle involving the Book of Revelation and the art of Hieronymus Bosch.

I didn’t believe in it. And that hurt the story.

Also, Lowe needs to work on his hero’s back story a little. At one point in The 24th Letter, Sean O’Brien goes into a fistfight to the death with a guy who trains in martial arts and does this sort of thing all the time. If the author wants me to believe O’Brien can beat this guy, he needs to tell me about SEAL training or Jedi discipleship or a radioactive spider bite or something. I don’t think the average retired cop is up to it.

In short, Lowe is improving but he’s not ready for the first team yet. Cautions for language and adult themes.