In for a Pound
By Richard Marinick
Justin, Charles & Co., 289 pp., $24.95
The cold streets of Boston have never been particularly welcoming to Delray McCauley. But now that the former state trooper is out of jail and working behind the bar in his beloved Southie, McCauley finds himself even more of an outsider. No longer a cop, neither does he entirely fit in with the hoods - or "boyos" - of his old neighborhood, a rough crowd run by the ruthless Jack "Wacko" Curran. Therefore, when one old friend gets in touch to ask for a favor, McCauley agrees.
The favor seems straightforward: A lawyer wants a stolen safe returned, with no questions asked and no attention for the shady contents (a CD recording bribes). But given the divided loyalties and strong emotions of McCauley's worlds past and present, things are bound to get bloody, and they do.
Richard Marinick knows both South Boston and the ins and outs of crime. Like his protagonist, he is a former state trooper. In addition, Marinick did time for his role in an armored car and bank robbery ring. That experience played into his thrilling, reality-based debut novel, 2004's "Boyos." But this time around, he has stretched a bit, pushing more into fiction although staying with the world - and the kinds of characters - he knows well.
In this second gritty street noir novel, he again sets his crime plot in a world where only losers have jobs, and real characters hang out at the kind of bars and diners where strangers would be wise not to enter. Into the mix, Marinick throws an outsider, a tough but somewhat naive love interest named Mackey Wainwright. She's an outsider as well, a Wellesley girl who has turned from her easy background to become a private investigator, and she had made a previous attempt at locating the safe. But her unfamiliarity with the neighborhood had led her only to dead ends, and she teams up with McCauley hoping to learn a bit more of the trade. He, in return, finds himself responding to her by coming out of his shell - a protective deadness that started when his fiancee died in a traffic accident and that only thickened during his three years in prison. She's a fun addition to the mix, capable of taking care of herself, and as she ever so slowly softens McCauley's harsher edges, she grows into the kind of character one hopes will recur.
The only flaw in this sophomore effort is one of overkill. While some readers will dote on Marinick's use of detail, with every street corner bar and doughnut shop lovingly described, that same attention to specifics can overwhelm the plot. For example, lines like this one give a real sense of local color: "In the far corner a guy in a red sweatshirt, with B.U. on the back sat at a table with an open Herald in front of him." But when every scene details the clothes, the reading material, the haircuts, and such peripherals as cigarettes or the kinds of rags used to wipe down bars, a kind of wordiness bogs down what should be lean action. In addition, Marinick's writing of dialect - "brain's gotta be sharp gettin' them drinks just right" - can get tiresome. We know these guys aren't charm school grads; their propensity for drugs and violence shows that. In cases like this, a little less would have helped us hear them more clearly.
Clea Simon is a freelance writer and the author of "Cattery Row."
