Paul Breen’s RUNNER’S PATH is a book suffused with a quiet and rueful sorrow, both over the premature death of a lively young woman, Andie Sheridan, and the death-in-life of the protagonist Sam O’Neill, so far trapped in his own drinking that he chooses not to fight it anymore even when it means the death of a potential love affair. Recovering alcoholics should avoid this book, as the fumes practically rise from every page–O’Neill at one point even sneaks a flask of Scotch into a brewpub. The mystery itself strikes a good balance between “enough clues for the intelligent and perceptive reader to figure things out” and “enough mystery to keep things challenging”, with the main challenge being to figure out how the crime happened in the first place, and to break the criminal’s seemingly unbreakable alibi.
The story’s premises are generally realistic, sensible, and reliant on believable characteristics and personality traits of the people involved. The police failure to find the culprit is clearly explainable not by apathy or incompetence but by a lack of a particular area of expertise and by the failure to see how the personalities of the victim, the murderer, and the people surrounding them contributed to the crime and its cover-up. O’Neill succeeds in part because he was once a runner himself, and in part because his somewhat cynical but perceptive view of human nature lets him see and identify the key character traits of both victim and criminal. His own story, woven through his investigation of Andie’s, is almost a Greek tragedy in that, while competent and intelligent himself, and perceptive enough to see exactly what he is doing to himself and his life, he either stubbornly or resignedly clings to the alcohol abuse that kills the possibility of everything positive and promising in his life. He solves the case and gets justice for Andie, but he can’t bring himself to shake the demon haunting his own days, and the deepest tragedy of all is the way he clings to his own belief that continuing to drink is a choice he, and not the alcohol, is making. On the other hand, though, he solves Andie’s case specifically because he recognizes the key choice she makes that leads to her death, one that in its own sad way parallels his own. The sense of bitter irony in that fact adds to the bleak, almost noir atmosphere of the novel.
Paul Breen’s RUNNER’S PATH is a solidly-written murder mystery, written with a somber realism and an eye for tragedy, not only in the victim’s life but the protagonist’s as well.
~Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader