Kind of Blue by Miles Corwin is one of many many books that pile up in the TBR pile but don’t get read because of time constraints, my reading choice idiosyncrasies, etc.
Carmela Ciuraru’s review in the LA Times, however, will force me to give it another look:
“Kind of Blue,” named for the seminal Miles Davis album that Ash loves, avoids the overheated prose so often found in crime fiction. Corwin is a minimalist, yet his descriptions are precise: Blood spatter at a crime scene looks like “a miniature pointillist portrait,” and the Los Angeles River is “a thin stream of brackish water purling down the graffiti-scarred cement banks.”
Nor does Corwin resort to scenes of cheap, grisly violence in the name of so-called authenticity. His concerns are psychological — revealing how criminals think, how cops think and how criminals think when they happen to be corrupt cops. And “Kind of Blue” is genuinely suspenseful: Although there’s no question that Ash will solve the crime that haunts him (and the one he’s been hired to solve), how he gets there is far from predictable.
