ALL ROADS LEAD TO MURDER

Bird chronicles an aging New York detective’s cases in this trio of crime stories.

Mo Shuman is a police detective in New York’s 12th Precinct. Known as "Shuman the Human" for his unusually strong sense of empathy (at least for a cop), he finds his humanity challenged and reaffirmed in equal measure by the people he encounters on the Lower East Side. Along with his ex-partner and best friend, Mike Gallagher, Shuman is about the best New York has to offer when it comes to solving a tricky murder case, but now that he’s on the verge of retirement, he’s mentally preparing himself to leave it all behind; Bird covers the final cases of Shuman’s career in this omnibus collection. In “Murder at the Yeshiva,” the Yiddish-speaking Shuman is assigned to investigate the death of a yeshiva student underneath the Williamsburg Bridge. In fact, the young man was a student at the same yeshiva Shuman attended during an earlier, more religious period of his life. As Mo shepherds a new, less-experienced partner through the case, he’s moved to confront his relationship with his own Jewishness. In “One Murder at a Time,” Shuman eschews retirement to work with Gallagher again as part of a cold case unit. “Gallagher had pitched the Cold Case Squad as a bunch of dinosaurs who knew how to solve difficult cases. Shuman owed Gallagher big time. Gallagher had saved his life twice, and Shuman figured if he retired he’d never be able to pay off those debts.” It turns out, however, that some powerful people may not want two dinosaurs digging up long-buried bones. In the concluding “Go West Old Man,” murder strikes much closer to home—in Shuman’s own household—leaving the bereft ex-detective looking for a distraction from his pain. He finds one at the Texas border, of all places, where a reporter friend of his is suspected of murder after her girlfriend turns up missing. With each case, Shuman’s humanity is put further to the test—and eventually he may reach a breaking point.

Bird’s matter-of-fact prose mixes sober descriptions of his characters and the city with jocular back-and-forth exchanges between cops and civilians, as when Shuman’s lieutenant explains why he picked him and his partner for the yeshiva case: “ ‘Boss,’ said Dynaburski, ‘I really don’t know this yeshiva stuff.’ Mulroy turned to Dynaburski. ‘You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’ ‘But not like Orthodox or anything.’ ‘You two are the only Jewish homicide team in the city. Even Israel can’t put together a team like this.’ ” Shuman makes for a winning protagonist—professional, mildly introverted, slightly haunted, with a deep love of New York City and of the close-knit Puerto Rican family he married into. The pieces flow nicely into one another, telling a continuous story even as each feels self-contained. The transition to Texas in the final volume may strike some readers as jarring, but regardless of the setting, Bird manages to capture the ways in which crime—and particularly murder—seems inextricably woven into the American experience.

A collection of three gripping, well-told police procedurals.