The Man in the Crooked Hat

Starred review from October 2, 2017
Set in Detroit, this relentless thriller from Dolan (The Last Dead Girl) focuses on an ex-cop’s search for the man who murdered his wife. Two years after Jack Pellum’s beloved Olivia, a photographer, was strangled near the Huron River, Jack remains obsessed with finding the killer, whom he believes to be a man wearing a fedora he saw watching her a few days before her death. He continues to blanket the city with flyers bearing the suspect’s image. Then Carl Dumisani, his former partner, reports that someone has written, “There’s a killer, and he wears a crooked hat,” on the wall near the body of a recent suicide. This news leads Jack to Paul Rook, who thinks that his mother was killed by Olivia’s murderer. Dolan has a gift for making the circumstances of even minor characters moving, such as a 30-something man resigned to a meaningless life working in a coffee shop. Superior prose, plotting, and characterization put Dolan in the top rank of crime novelists. Agent: Victoria Skurnik, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.

March 5, 2018
Dolan reveals the killer’s identity in chapter one of his latest, making it a whydunit, complete with twists and surprises aplenty. The characters offer reader Richards the chance to strut his stuff, and he doesn’t disappoint. The protagonist, Detroit ex-cop Jack Pellum, who Richards gives a deep, raspy voice, has devoted nearly two years of his life searching for a fedora-wearing man whom he saw eyeing his wife, Olivia, shortly before her murder. The obsession has cost him his job and maybe some of his sanity, but it’s starting to produce results, leading him toward the killer, Michael Underhill. Jack is driven and haunted, but always sympathetic, even when rudely refusing help from friends and his father, a powerful federal judge who expresses genuine empathy and love for his son. For the killer, an unruffled, pragmatic hit man, Richards uses a soft, quiet, thoughtful voice that’s tender in the presence of his girlfriend. As Jack proceeds to an inevitable confrontation with Underhill, meeting an assortment of people, Richards’s vocal range stretches from youthful brashness to aged croak. The multifaceted vocal performance accentuates Dolan’s fully realized characters, making this a satisfying audiobook. A Putnam hardcover.