THE BIG DREAM, the third volume in Owen Thomas’s Raymond Mackey Mystery series, finds the troubled private investigator embroiled in a plot that takes in political double-dealing, gangsters, and a strong shot of police corruption. Mackey’s got a new gig working for Internal Affairs, but the cops seem to think he’s a mole for the mob. Surveillance photos, tense meetings with the attorney general, and rising suspicion pull him into a dangerous, strategic struggle. Branded a traitor and a scapegoat, he must navigate trauma, guilt, and truth to survive. All the while, he’s still struggling to come to terms with the loss of his wife Marlo. But when an old picture of Marlo with an underworld figure surfaces, he wonders if he ever really knew her at all.

Thomas’s hardboiled detective is a well-drawn, old-school tough guy. He’s got some issues familiar to the genre: he drinks too much, has panic attacks. He’s haunted by recurring nightmares that no amount of fencing with his shrink can seem to shake. Now his doctor has found something on his lung, but he can’t seem to quit the Camels. And he’s writing a book—for an audience of one. Unsurprisingly, the lead character in his book shares his own paranoia, like a creeping city sickness rooted in the relentless grime of the streets, shady criminals, and even shadier cops.

There are some neat turns of phrase, Chandler-esque in places. Thomas is very good at setting the scene, like this section from the opening of an early chapter: “The sun needs an antidepressant. It broods in its bed of grimy gray cumulus and the world glints back in wet streaks of borrowed light. All the streets hiss beneath my tires like a bed of angry snakes.” Likewise, the detective’s short and cynical quips are right on the nose.

But you can have too much of a good thing, and THE BIG DREAM is very long indeed. It runs to more than 600 pages, and there’s just not enough going on to wear that kind of length. This is no multi-layered tangle of plot lines, like an Ellroy or a Winslow, that needs space to breath. This novel is a straight-ahead hardboiled romp—the best of which, like the aforementioned Chandler’s novels, wrap up in less than half the number of pages. What starts out as enjoyable becomes something of a slog by the end. Which is a shame, as Thomas does write very well.

THE BIG DREAM: A Raymond Mackey Mystery (Book 3) is a well-written detective thriller with a memorable main character. Owen Thomas’s stylish prose recalls Raymond Chandler in his ability to evoke a scene, and his lead’s cynical eye nods to some of the great hardboiled detectives. An enjoyable yarn whose sharpness is somewhat blunted by the excessive page count.

~ Kent Lane for IndieReader