Person of Interest

I have been heavily into literary novels lately so this was a refreshing break and a tense one. “Person of Interest” is an interesting variation on the police procedural since it involves what you might call a “police family procedural” approach. Craig McHugh is a Chicago detective, undercover, to discover the identity of a Chinese gang that is infesting the city with a particularly virulent form of drug that is taking lives. It’s called “China White.” While McHugh labors undercover, his wife, Leslie, is convinced he’s having an affair, an assumption that allows her to feel free to indulge herself in fantasies and inappropriate behavior with a young Greek jazz pianist named Niko who just happens to be the current boyfriend of Leslie’s nubile and hormone-racked daughter, Ivy. The plotline consists of McHugh’s attempts to close the case without getting killed, Leslie’s conquering her mid-life housewife sexual frustration and Ivy belonging to the family in any reasonable way.
McHugh gets beaten, bitten by spiders and shot at, what happens to Leslie we will let you read and Ivy gets down to no end of problems, most of them caused by the utter cluelessness of a teenager who wants to be older than she is capable of handling at the moment. Sound familiar?

The two most interesting characters are McHugh and his wife and their misunderstandings and misinterpretations are the most damaging, but the most rewarding as well, in their working out. Schwegel has a good sense of pace: start fast and speed up from there, and a good sense of how to write street dialogue without losing the suburbanite reader. If you want to read a good crime novel that also seems mostly believable and one in which “heroism” is not cavalierly defined, “Person of Interest” may be a book of interest to you.