The Middle of Nowhere: A Lenny Bliss Mystery - Hardcover

The third mystery featuring New York homicide detective Lenny Bliss delivers humor, soul, and dark drama in equal measure. Bliss is dealing with an old corpse fished out of the East River and with his wife's sudden interest in writing a crime novel, when a teenage boy is found murdered after a party in a posh townhouse on the Upper East Side. The scant evidence seems to point to an evasive crew of teenagers and to the man who went to the townhouse looking for his daughter in the middle of the night--Bliss himself, who must figure out whom he can trust with his secret before the missing videotape from the home's security camera surfaces. Some interesting takes on the perils of fatherhood appear amidst the investigative work here, and the descriptions of Bliss muttering his way through a yoga class and reading excerpts from his wife's novel-in-progress will have readers smirking right along with him. Carrie Bissey
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In Bob Sloan's interesting but ultimately unsatisfying third series entry, The Middle of Nowhere: A Lenny Bliss Mystery (after 1999's Bliss Jumps the Gun), the veteran NYPD homicide detective finds juggling his job and family life increasingly challenging after two bodies surface: one in the East River, which may be linked with a slumlord's gentrification schemes, the other in an affluent and influential family's Upper East Side apartment. Sloan succeeds at crafting finely etched portraits of the many people whose lives are touched by the crimes, but the various affecting vignettes don't make for a coherent whole, leaving the reader with a taste of a promising talent not fully realized.
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