Product Description

From the bestselling author of London Fields,The Information and Heavy Water comes this stylistically brilliant story. As riveting as the best of Elmore Leonard, Night Train is a gritty, totally captivating mystery about a female homicide detective and the one case that got under her skin.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #322590 in Books
• Published on: 1999-01-26
• Released on: 1999-01-26
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 175 pages

From Amazon.com
On a beautiful night in a second-tier American city, a beautiful astrophysicist with the clichéd everything to live for shoots herself dead with a .22. Tough-talking detective Mike Hoolihan, quickly summoned to the scene, has witnessed every sort of victim: "Jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters." But this case is different. Mike has known the young woman for years--she's the daughter, it turns out, of Mike's mentor, Colonel Tom Rockwell. And the colonel is desperate to find a perp, despite massive evidence to the contrary.

In Night Train, Martin Amis has fixed his sights on the American female--with a difference. Mike is in fact a woman--a hulking, chain-smoking, deep-voiced alcoholic who comes complete with a squalid family background and a none-too-happy foreground. She even lives in a building next to the proverbial night train and can't survive without her tape with eight different versions of the R & B "hymn to the low rent."

Did this novel begin as narrative flexing, yet another test the hypertalented author--and number-one Elmore Leonard fan--wanted to pose to himself? If so, he has passed with flying colors. True, Mike's search occasionally pushes her up against pulp pathos, but mostly the genre keeps Amis true. "Police are pretty blasé about ballistics. Remember the Kennedy assassination and 'the magic bullet'? We know that every bullet is a magic bullet. Particularly the .22 roundnose. When a bullet enters a human being, it has hysterics. As if it knows it shouldn't be there."

Mike spends her time weighing the evidence, wishing it would point to murder, and letting us in on some current police realities. Whatever television tells us, in real life (not to mention postmodern crime fiction), there's no neat solution. Even that old standard, the good cop-bad cop approach, no longer works: "It's not just that Joe Perp is on to it, having seen good cop-bad cop a million times on reruns of Hawaii Five-O. The only time bad cop was any good was in the old days, when he used to come into the interrogation room every ten minutes and smash your suspect over the head with the yellow pages." With such discourses, Amis is stretching the rubber band of his book's realism. But in the end, all his fancy footwork doesn't stop us from admiring and pitying his heroine, and hoping she won't board the ultimate night train: suicide.

From Library Journal
This intriguing new work from the ever gritty, disturbing Amis (e.g., The Information, LJ 5/1/95) is a sort of anti-police procedural, following all the rules and then blowing them away at the end to reach for something different. Detective Mike Hoolihan is a tough woman, on the force for years and currently recovering from the alcohol abuse that can go with a high-stress job. Now she has her toughest assignment yet. Jennifer Rockwell, the picture-perfect daughter of top cop Colonel Tom, has deliberately blown out her brains, using not one but three bullets, and the colonel is convinced it's murder. Hoolihan investigates, finds odd little facts (lithium use, a pick-up in a bar), and concludes that Jennifer was leaving clues to something. Tension builds as the reader awaits impatiently for the revelation of some dark secret, and at first it is a disappointment when none comes. But soon the anti-climax starts to feel right: beyond thrills, we've learned something important about how the human psyche really works. Recommended for most collections.
-?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA?"Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness." Detective Mike Hoolihan is a case-hardened policewoman, but this case is different. The dead woman is Jennifer Rockwell, the daughter of Mike's friend (and boss), Colonel Tom Rockwell, head of criminal investigation. Even though all the evidence points to suicide, Colonel Tom asks Mike to take another look. Everyone agrees that Jennifer had everything; she was beautiful, a brilliant astrophysicist with a promising career, in love with a professor at the university. Why suicide? As Mike probes the secrets of the deceased woman's life, she is forced to re-examine her own, and the decision she makes at the end of her investigation says as much about her as it does about Jennifer, or Colonel Tom. The author's portrayal of the conflicts and complexities of a criminal investigation is utterly convincing, the dialogue is authentic, and the writing is both spare and powerful. YAs who like detective stories will find themselves pulled into this investigation.?Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.