HOLLIS AND GRAY

In Zeigler’s novel, when a private detective is shot and falls into a coma, his partner discovers that he was investigating the death of her parents.

When Frank Hollis first sees Serafina Gray working as a cocktail waitress at Planet Janet, a strip club in Detroit, his attraction to her isn’t sexual, though she “looked like a Brazilian model straight out of a Victoria’s Secret catalog.” His interest in her is more protective. He wants to rescue this lost woman, who grew up in foster care, from a life of lonely despair, but he also wants a measure of love, however small, in his own lonesome life. The author affectingly describes the mix of emotions: “He’d always expected to die alone, after pushing everyone he’d ever loved away. Now he had someone to love, and he was still going to die alone. This was how it was going to end.” He offers her a job working at his detective agency, and she accepts—and a relationship both professional and familial develops between them. She’s horrified and confused when Hollis is suddenly shot and falls into a coma. The shooting looks like it might be the work of a gang, but that isn’t a world Hollis typically inhabits; he prefers the well-paying work of corporate intrigue to criminal investigation. Serafina discovers that, when he was shot, Hollis was looking into the death of her own parents, shopkeepers who were murdered when she was only 4 years old. Zeigler combines, with impressive artistry, a hard-boiled detective story with a nuanced tale of love amid the ruins of sad solitude. The only defects of the novel are its length and pace—the author could have easily trimmed 100 pages from this somewhat bloated work, which has a tendency to move at a languorous amble. Despite this not inconsiderable flaw, this is an enthralling story, brimming with heart-aching drama and psychological nuance.

A riveting mystery, cleverly and tenderly plotted.