The 12th Matt Scudder, and he's all but moved in and married Elaine and thinking of settling down.[return][return]Meanwhile, a client comes to him, with a seemingly impossible task - a group of 31 men have been reduced to 14 over 20 years, and a killer is suspected but cannot be proved. Matt is to determine the killer before he strikes again

This is a good example of Block, interesting read ( )

"A Long Line of Dead Men" is the 12th Matthew Scudder novel, a most unusual detective series. If you have been reading this series, you, of course, know that Scudder left the police force after a shooting that ended with an innocent child getting killed, that Scudder descended into drink and despair, leaving his job and family behind, but holding court at Armstrong's bar, doing favors such as detective work for friends and friends of friends. After descending into despair and blackouts, he found salvation of a sort attending meetings in church basements, sometimes more than one meeting a day, but taking one day at a time, staying sober. At this point in the series, Scudder is living with and engaged to Elaine, a former high priced call girl who had met and exchanged favors with when he was on the force and she needed a friend on the force. He has left his rundown hotel for an apartment with Elaine. He still lacks a PI license and does favors for friends.

This mystery is a little different from the ordinary. There is secret group of 31 men who meet once a year and, when they meet, they read the names of the departed, and then eat and talk and meet again the next year. Only problem: they have been dying at an actuarially extraordinary rate. It is not clear if there is a murderer stalking them, but the numbers of murders and suicides and accidents even in a statistically small group are quite high and suspiciously high at that. Scudder doesn't even know if there is a murderer out there or what the motive is or how anyone found out about the group, if indeed there is a stalker. There is not much to go on and little in the way of clues, since the killings go back many years and there is no pattern among them. Scudder doggedly pokes around as he usually does until he finds something. It is a well-written, engrossing mystery and well worth reading. For those of us who have been following the world of Scudder, this book also develops further the personalities of Scudder, Elaine, and TJ and Scudder's gritty world in the streets of the five boroughs.
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I don't think I've read any Lawrence Block books in the last 10 years, but he was at one point a favorite of mine. My tastes have changed, I guess, or maybe the competition is better, but A Long Line of Dead Men (written in '94) wasn't good enough to get me back into his work.

It's an interesting mystery- someone may (or may not) be killing the members of a secret club of rich guys, and PI Matthew Scudder is hired by one of the members to figure out what's going on with the high death rate. Scudder eventually does that, but getting from here to there was pretty slow going. The writing is fine, but the story is slow paced and the constant references to AA was a bit irritating (although they did have a place in the plot). In addition to the slow plot, I had a bit of a problem with the conclusion. The mystery was solved and the bad guy was apprehended (sort of), but his fate didn't seem to be a very realistic one. ( )

This was probably my least favorite in the Matthew Scudder series. I thought Block added a character that was too stereotypical for my liking. I also thought the ending was a little too far-fetched. Block has always ended the stories with plot twists, but this one was too much even for me. I'll continue the series because the others more than make up for this one.
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