Everybody Dies by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
If Scudder 13, the one before this one, was the opposite of a thriller, and this one, 14, is the opposite of 13, I guess that makes Everybody Dies a thriller. Which it is, and therefore not much of a “mystery.” But we’ve long passed the point where the books in this series are mystery novels with the same main character. These are books about Matthew Scudder and his friends.
In fact, this one is more about one of his friends than himself. A mystery novel might be “about” the main character, but about the mystery, so if the Scudder series used to be about the mysteries, and then they ended up being about Scudder, no we’ve kind of gone full circle. Everybody Dies is all about Matthew’s friend Mick Ballou.
In other words, Lawrence Block is idea-mining from the Scudder side-characters. He sort of did that with Elaine back in A Ticket to the Boneyard. But I like it, because who knows, maybe in one of the last three books we’ll get the TJ story as well.
As to the meat and gristle of Everybody Dies: the highest body count we’ve had in a Scudder novel. Goes with the title I guess, part and parcel with being a thriller. We’ve seen, in past novels, Scudder edging a moral line, and straddling it, if not stepping over it quite so unambiguously. What would be interesting if the Matthew in Scudder 14 were to, say, be asked how to solve the problem at the end of Scudder 12. I think he would have chosen differently. Which means Scudder is still evolving, so we’ll see where he ends up.