Opening with a pleasingly brutal home invasion/ robbery/ execution that comes with a neat twist in its closing paragraph which immediately wrong-foots the reader, DOUBLE INDEMNITY is an extremely well written contemporary thriller. Blending maverick cops, hardboiled killers and rogue businessmen, author Richard Zappa has created an engrossing and entirely believable crime novel that continues the story of New Orleans homicide detective Jo Crowder.
Crowder is under suspicion by Internal Affairs of being a rogue cop. Her record of using lethal force topping all detectives in the department. But she is ruthlessly efficient with the lowest number of cold-case files and the highest conviction rate for first-degree-murder. If you’re a criminal and Crowder is after you then you’re likely going to end up behind bars. Or dead. After piecing together a link between a number of seemingly random deaths, Crowder finds herself unraveling a lethally corrupt insurance company. It’s the kind of plot set-up familiar to readers of the Jack Reacher series wherein the hero picks away at a seemingly above board institution and ultimately busts open its rotten core. By using a split narrative Zappa reveals much of the plot to the reader ahead of his lead character so there is no great mystery to unpick as such but the way that Crowder uncovers the details as her case progresses is satisfying and perfectly paced.
Titling the book DOUBLE INDEMNITY prompts inevitable comparisons with James M. Cain’s masterpiece of the same title, and though Zappa is not yet up there with Cain, or indeed Raymond Chandler who co-wrote the script of the famous film version, he does share a similarity in style in his economic prose and ability to shift into action sequences with the ease of a finely tuned engine. Indeed, DOUBLE INDEMNITY is reminiscent of the kind of high quality, deceptively simple crime paperbacks of the golden era of American pulps. Though DOUBLE INDEMNITY works as a standalone novel, on completion readers will almost certainly want to catch up on Crowder’s previous antics in the novels “The Easter Murders” and “Identical Misfortune”. And as long as Crowder can avoid getting herself killed or fired the series deserves to run and run.
DOUBLE INDEMNITY is the third Jo Crowder novel and establishes Richard Zappa as a first class thriller writer and his homicide detective heroine as one to watch.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader