THE MAN WHO SWORE HE'D NEVER GO HOME AGAIN

Stewart Hoag’s first case.

Back in 1982, when his first novel has just catapulted him to fame, Hoagy meets stage and movie actress Merilee Nash, and they instantly fall in love and adopt a basset hound they christen Lulu. Everything’s set for a happily-ever-after (though readers familiar with Hoagy’s other cases will know it’s more complicated than that) until Hoagy gets a phone call from Maggie McKenna, his first love back in Oakmont, Connecticut. For years, Maggie’s mother Mary, the town librarian, had leukemia, but her sufferings ended when someone brained her with a paperweight bust of Mark Twain. Mary was such an important mentor to the budding writer that Hoagy feels he has to go back home to pay his respects to her, even though everyone in Oakmont has hated him ever since his father, Montgomery Hoag, closed the brass mill and threw the town, which it had already seriously polluted, into an economic tizzy it’s never recovered from. And it’s not really true, reflects Hoagy, that you can’t go home again: “You can. It’s just a totally unpleasant experience.” He’s in Oakmont just long enough to pick a fight with a pair of drug dealers, enjoy some meat loaf and macaroni with Maggie, get shot and left for dead, and miss Mary’s funeral. Even though Merilee, whom everyone recognizes and fawns over, leaves him to do a table reading for David Mamet back in New York, Lulu stays on and ends up fingering, or pawing, the obvious killer. So, as Hoagy acknowledges, it’s Lulu’s first case too.

Overlong and not very mysterious, but a welcome prequel to the hero’s more jaded adventures.