The Room Of White Fire

T. Jefferson Parker has written many private-eye novels, but The Room Of White Fire introduces a new sleuth. It's pretty good, but completely routine in the manner of PI novels. It did win the Shamus Award a few years for best work in that genre.

The detective in question is Roland Ford, and he's in the tradition of the gumshoe as white knight, as outlined by Raymond Chandler. His weaknesses are actually what most would consider strengths: "My mother used to tell me I was too much of a softie to be a good Marine. Which I’m sure applied equally to being a good boxer, cop, or investigator. Maybe she was right. I sure didn’t get much soft from her, however. She’d chew a lightbulb to get what she wanted."

Ford narrates, and he his fired to mind an escaped mental patient from a fancy asylum. The young man, Clay Hickman, was part of a black ops torture facility in Romania, and wants to expose what went on there. The head of that torture outfit is now the owner of the asylum that is keeping Hickman drugged.

The book is a thinly veiled damnation of torture during the Bush years, and I think most decent people can agree, so this is a bit of preaching to the choir. Ford was in Fallujah, and joined the service, as did Hickman, because of 9/11. As Ford says, "Yes, Roland Ford, private investigator—with a history degree and a concealed-carry permit—was more interested in forgetting than remembering his own country’s recent past."

The writing is crisp but the cliches abound. Ford is a tough guy, and defies his own client to do the right thing. He is drawn to Hickman's doctor, but in a nice touch they don't sleep together (they do lie together clothes on a bed next to each other). Ford owns a rental property people by an assortment of odd characters, who I'm sure will play roles in the next books (there are already  two more).

Books like these are like snack food, not particularly nourishing, but satisfies a hunger. At times Parker creates a vivid scene, like this one when Ford finds a dead body: "On the dining room floor was a dark colored carpet and on the carpet, lying still, was a man. I dropped to one knee, gun raised in both hands, viewing the world beyond a sight notch and a vertical post. A gun in your hand changes who you are. Heart thumping fast, I was thoughtless but sensory. Movement beyond the man: a white cat outside, looking at me through a sliding glass door. Movement above the cat: the breeze in a pine tree. Oddities of the door glass: two round shatters around two small holes."