Created by Bob Reiss
Well, this Reiss guy has chutzpah, anyway.
He’s all over the place in the convoluted but engaging The Impossible Detective (2026), trying to link MARK ST. JOHN, his celebrity NYC private eye and supposedly a master of impossible mysteries, to both the past (he’s the grandson of legendary sleuth The Falcon, lives in a fancy Upper West Side brownstone (on Edgar Allan Poe Street, no less) with his associates (just like Nero Wolfe, etc.) — and to a present that is slipping, slipping into the future.
Seems a precocious twelve-year-old, Abani Singh, has witnessed a murder, but nobody — not her protective mother, not the cops, nobody — believes her. Mostly because she claims the man was a hit-and-run victim, killed by a car without a driver.
Even St. John is skeptical — until somebody tries to kill Abani.
There’s an awful lot of world-building going on here (groundwork for a possible series?), as Reiss dutifully introduces a large cast, an unnecessary love triangle, numerous childhood flashbacks that add little, and a barrage of punny movie titles. Most of it fun enough, but hardly essential.
Fortunately, Reiss eventually abandons the most of the gimmicky sideshows to focus on St. John and his investigation, which actually is worth following. It’s a provocative son of a bitch, full of sometimes unexpected slam bang action, featuring a dangerous cult, professional assassins, amateurish thugs, mental illness, biological warfare and assorted government agencies. Also raised: actual questions about morality, faith, the potential dangers (real or imagined) of AI, the nature of evil, and maybe, just maybe, God.
Not bad. Not bad at all, although I’m not sure where a sequel could possibly go after this.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A graduate of Northwestern University and the University of Oregon, author and journalist Bob Reiss has taught writing at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Yale University in Singapore, Montclair University, the University of North Carolina MFA program, and on a Coast Guard ship in the Arctic Ocean. He claims to be fascinated by the border between order and anarchy, and his fiction tends to ask “what if” when it comes to big questions facing society.
NOVELS
- The Impossible Detective (2026) | Buy this book | Buy the audio | Kindle it!
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.
