“Matt Scudder meets Father Brown” is what the Amazon blurb says about Owen Parr’s Joey Mancuso-Father Dominic mystery series. I suppose you could say that about it, assuming the two classic detectives met in an auto collision and both got stunned a little. I got a free copy of Murder on Long Island, and I read it all the way through just to give it a chance. It didn’t get better as I read on.
Joey Mancuso and Father Dominic are half-brothers, we are told, sons of the same mother, one with an Italian father, the other with an Irish one. Through some sorts of shenanigans in the previous volume (Murder on Long Island is volume two in the series), they ended up running a bar and cigar club together, and solving murders on the side, using the establishment as their office. Though Father Dominic, to his credit, devotes most of his time to his church.
A Long Island property developer is accused of murdering his wife. He claims he found her shot to death, but the timeline shows that he waited 20 minutes before calling the police. Also, he was found covered in her blood and had gunshot residue on his hand. The man’s daughter persuades their lawyers to ask Joey and Father Dom to investigate, and they agree to look into it. Joey begins to suspect that those lawyers haven’t been working very hard on the case. There are plenty of leads to follow up, but the trial has already begun.
There is the germ of a good story in this book, I think. Joey and Father Dom could be interesting characters (though I get uneasy when I’m told a priest is “adapting his ministry to the 21st Century”). But the writing simply isn’t very good. Misplaced modifiers are common. Word meanings are confused. Many passages are clumsily written and/or too wordy.
There are courtroom scenes, and (perhaps this was aggravated for me by the fact that I recently read a very good legal thriller) those scenes struck me as highly inauthentic, Perry Mason Show stuff.
There are also technical problems with the text. The paragraphs (without indentations) are separated by multiple spaces, so that many whole pages contain just one paragraph and a lot of white space. Also, oddly, there are occasional digital footnotes which seem to be notes from preliminary readers. These should have been stripped out, if any care at all had been taken with the publication.
Overall, this reader was not much impressed with Murder on Long Island.