If you haven’t treated yourself to any volumes in the
Frank Quinn series by John Lutz, let me be the first to urge you to
do so.

Quinn was a homicide detective who now heads Quinn &
Associates, a private investigation agency.
“Associates” include Pearl Kasner, an ex-bank guard and
Quinn’s former (and still erstwhile) love interest, and Larry
Fedderman, who was previously Quinn’s police cohort before
his own retirement. They make for a prickly team, with
Quinn’s residual feelings for Pearl hidden on his sleeve, and
a flurry of barbed repartee between Fedderman and Pearl being the
exception rather than the rule. Quinn and his investigators are the
best at what they do, and as a result are frequently called upon by
Police Commissioner Harley Renz to aid the department in a
particularly difficult investigation. MISTER X, the fifth and
latest Quinn novel, finds the group back in action --- and in
danger --- in the most exciting installment of the series to
date.

The book gets rolling when Quinn & Associates is asked by
Tiffany Keller to reopen an investigation into a series of murders
that took place in New York some five years previously. The
murderer, known as the Carver, savagely mutilated a number of young
women before seemingly dropping off the map and leaving the NYPD
with an unsolved and cold case. Tiffany’s twin sisters was
one of the victims; after experiencing a small financial windfall,
she retains Quinn to obtain closure and to see that justice is done
once and for all. Not everyone is happy that these killings are
being revisited. Renz, in fact, warns Quinn off the case in no
uncertain terms, not wanting a blemish on the NYPD to be reopened
for all to see.

Everything changes, though, when a fresh series of murders occur
that appear to be related to the original Carver slayings. Renz,
ever the political animal, sees a chance to solve a new case and
close an old one. He brings Quinn & Associates under his wing
once again --- though not without some extracurricular pressure
from Quinn --- and opens the NYPD’s resources to them. This
includes the highly entertaining and quietly competent
Mutt-and-Jeff homicide team of Vitali and Mishkin, as well as a
Detroit journalist who may well have been one of the first
attempted victims of the Carver and one of the very few to survive
his attacks.

There are the twists and turns that one might come to expect
from a thriller of this nature. Lutz, however, is a hardboiled
veteran of the grammar wars and has forgotten more plot tricks than
most authors can remember. Within the final 100 pages, he turns
everything his cast of characters knows upside down and sideways,
and keeps doing it until he runs out of pages. The result is a book
that has everything: a dangerous killer, a pulse-pounding mystery,
a shocking solution, and an ending that will resonate with the
reader long after the final sentence is read. Oh, and Pearl falls
in love, too, but not with Quinn.

It is not necessary to read the first four installments of the
series, although you will certainly want to after finishing this
new one. Lutz, as he has demonstrated time and again not only with
this series but also with his stand-alone works, is capable of
scaring the pants off his readers and making them like it. MISTER X
is no exception.