He has his key out, and slips it into the lock. Inside, the two men hear the key in the lock. The seated man gets to his feet, the pacer moves toward the door. Byrne Hollander turns the key, pushes the door open, lets his wife enter first, follows her inside.
Then they catch sight of the two men, but it's too late.
Matt Scudder and his wife Elaine were one of the last people to see them alive. Though they did not know them, they saw them that evening at a gala event put on at Avery Fisher Hall as a thank you to all the people who supported the arts over the past year. Matt and Elaine do not speak to Byrne and Susan Hollander, and, after the concert is over and everyone departs for home, the chance to do so disappears forever. The couple walk home, enter their beautiful brownstone, and are murdered by a pair of thieves who were lurking in the darkness, waiting for their return. This disturbs Matt partially because he thinks he might have known them, for they were, after all, often at the same events, and they only lived less than a mile apart. He and his wife, too, walked home that night, and such awful things could easily have happened to them.
His thoughts are not satisfied when the police find the killers, the loot unsold, in an apartment. One is murdered by his partner, the other dead by his own hand. 62-year old Scudder thinks it's too pat, but doesn't get involved until his assistant, TJ introduces him to Lia. Lia thinks that her cousin Kristen, the Hollander's 23-year-old daughter, is the mastermind behind the murders. Kristen had just recently taken up residence in her parent's home, needing a place to live after a bad break-up. It doesn't take long for him to be convinced that she's innocent, and he becomes worried that she may be the next target.
Most murder mysteries start off, well, with a murder. As does this one...but Block chooses a clever, if not poignant, way of telling us about the events. Since the story is narrated in the first person, he can not claim any real first hand knowledge of the events. So, he starts off telling us that the couple may have met at the fountain before coming upstairs, or that he may have gone and picked her up, but in either case they got there in time for drinks. Scudder knows that, because he thinks he might have seen them...then he goes through the evening, up until the murders, explaining that this is what he thinks happened. He knows the details, how the husband was shot, how Susan was assaulted before her throat was slashed...and he ends the scene beautifully. The gentleness of the end image, and the innate mercy and charity that that those who strive to be decent had left me all teary eyed, and I'd only been reading for a handful of minutes.
The hunt for the third, unknown entity is what takes up the rest of the story. Matt, who's been a detective for many years, even if he only does it in his spare time now, has a keen understanding of how investigations work, and slowly, but surely tracks down the killer. He makes some pretty awesome leaps in logic to get there, but they are entirely believable. The killer is inventive, terribly blood thirsty, and just a tad insane. In a couple of scenes he does things that require such guts to pull off, it really creeps you out when he is successful.
Block's prose has a wonderful flow to it. Matt, as he tells the story, has a voice that is sensible and wise, and sometimes he paints very beautiful images. Even when they are slightly horrific, there is a crystal-cut quality to them, and it makes this mystery an especially pleasurable read
