Big Brother Is Watching

More than a decade after he was last seen in the novel Catfish Café, Seattle private investigator Thomas Black finally returns in Earl Emerson’s Cape Disappointment, a story that mixes the personal with the political, and prevarications with conspiracies to produce what critic Jim Winter declares “an excellent work, though not for the faint of heart.” Winter explains:

Emerson starts this novel off with a bang. Literally. Black ... recounts his too-close-for-comfort experience with a bomb explosion inside a school gymnasium, where a political candidate had been speaking. Since he was smacked against the wall and impaled, Black’s description is naturally surreal, disjointed and horrifyingly graphic. The story lurches and halts between the recent past, where Black recalls talking to his wife on the phone as he watched her plane suddenly crash, and the present, while he’s trying to recover in a hospital bed. Black’s tale becomes coherent when he’s able to focus on the beginning of his latest adventure.

That beginning involves Black’s longtime friend turned spouse, lawyer Kathy Birchfield, going to work for the re-election campaign of Democratic U.S. Senator Jane Sheffield of Washington (“a sharp thorn in [George W.] Bush’s side”), while the P.I. himself signs on to run security for that solon’s opponent, a Republican ex-cop. Interrupting a planned vacation with her hubby, Birchfield chooses to fly off with Sheffield on a round-the-state stumping swing, only to plummet with the rest of their plane’s passengers into the Pacific Ocean. But is she really dead? In the aftermath of that tragedy, Black thinks he spots Kathy, and explanations for the airplane’s crash don’t make sense to him. Increasing the surreal factor in this thriller is an alcoholic former CIA hit man--the twin brother of Black’s friend, Snake Slezak--who is full of conspiracy theories connecting Sheffield’s out-of-the-sky demise with the airplane death of another U.S. senator, Paul Wellstone, and the horrors of September 11, 2001.

“This is a truly bizarre novel,” Winter concludes, but one well worth your time. Read more about Cape Disappointment here.

READ MORE: “Thomas Black Got a 10-Year Break, but the Seattle Detective Is Back,” by Jeff Ayers (Seattle Post-Intelligencer).