Earl W. Emerson was a firefighter in Seattle for over 32 years. He parlayed his law enforcement experience into crime fiction, winning the 1986 Shamus Award for best private eye novel for Poverty Bay (Avon Books, 1985), which was also shortlisted for the Anthony Award and the Edgar Award. His books were nominated for the Shamus Award in 1986, 1987, 1989, 1996, and 1998. They were nominated for the Anthony Award in 1994, 1996, and 1998. Black Hearts and Slow Dancing (William Morrow, 1988) was named one of the ten best thrillers of the year by the New York Times.
Emerson first wrote about private investigator Thomas Black in 1985, eventually publishing 15 books in the series. Interspersed with the Black stories he wrote five books about Mac Fontana, an arson investigator. He also wrote six stand-alone thrillers about firefighting between 2002 and 2008. He introduced Black, a former Seattle policeman turned private investigator, in The Rainy City (Avon Books, 1985).
Black is living off a pension and an occasional investigative gig. He rents the basement of his house to a law student named Kathy, who asks him to take a missing person case; her friend Michelle from college has disappeared. Her ineffectual husband Burton hasn’t seen her for a week. They hadn’t been doing well for awhile but he has no idea where she might have gone.
The case becomes unexpectedly violent when Michelle’s loud abrasive father shows up at her home with a strongman to take her toddler daughter. The thug roughs Burton up while the father grabs his granddaughter. Black and Kathy walk in on the aftermath and take Burton to the hospital. After Black returns to Seattle, having driven to Bellingham to interview Michelle’s aunt, he finds his own apartment thoroughly vandalized and Kathy tied up in a bathroom. The murder of a couple of witnesses brings homicide detectives into the case, while Black tries to sort through the contradictory stories he’s been hearing.
A sufficiently twisty plot with fresh characters wrapped up in pithy text make the popularity of this series understandable. The scene where Black pretends to have multiple personality disorder and Kathy acts as his wife trying to obtain psychiatric assistance for him in order to search for Michelle’s mental treatment records is surprisingly amusing and a bit of mirth in a story that grows progressively darker.
I am adding this series to my mental list of regional private investigators. I so appreciate books that are set somewhere out of the mainstream New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. Think the Tahoe series by Todd Borg, the Sin City series (Las Vegas) by J.D. Allen, the Milan Jacovich series (Cleveland) by Les Roberts, the Truman Smith series (Galveston) by Bill Crider, and many others. Recommended, especially for mystery fans who need a new set of books to binge read.