Buried Lies

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Beneath the glamorous milieu of country clubs and professional golf, there lurks an unpleasant underworld of crime and vice with which Kiernan Lenahan, the amateur sleuth introduced in Local Knowledge, is becoming reluctantly familiar. Golf pro at the Milton Country Club, Lenahan, a former lawyer, is a suspect after an arson fire destroys his pro shop, the adjoining cart garage and the living quarters of the Hispanic restaurant workers, killing one fireman. All too coincidental is the apparent suicide of popular caddie Jackie Mack, hit by a train the following morning. Determined to clear his own name and obtain a full Catholic funeral for Jackie, on whose caddying genius he was depending to make the PGA tour, Lenahan undertakes his amateur investigations, discovering a group called the Latin Cooperative, something akin to a Hispanic Mafia, with a firm grip on the workers and their families. Daly's tale will be of more interest to golfers than the general reader, as the only real excitement comes when Lenahan enters the PGA tournament at Winged Foot. Featuring mostly uninteresting characters and carrying a lead weight, this round lacks suspense and comes to a rather abrupt ending. The one bright spot is Jackie Mack, whose story, as it posthumously unfolds, provides the mystery implied in the book's title. (May)

Kirkus Reviews

The day after Kieran Lenahan's pro shop at the Milton Country Club burns to the ground—taking with it an adjoining "monkey house," leaving a dozen Latino restaurant workers homeless, and a firefighter dead from a suspicious exploding projectile—the news gets even darker: Ian MacEwan, a.k.a. Jackie Mack, the nonpareil caddie who was scheduled to shepherd Kieran through the vicissitudes of the PGA championship at nearby Winged Foot, is crushed under the wheels of an Amtrak train. Suicide, say several witnesses to the death, so hard-nosed Msgr. Barry Neumann refuses to give a funeral mass for Jackie, who's being kept so long above ground that the funeral director is starting to worry. Meantime, the local cops aren't idle: They're busy arresting Kieran for torching his own shop for the insurance. And Kieran's own lawyer, a mindless scrapper, has insisted on a hearing that'll fall on the second day of the PGA. So now Kieran, one reluctant amateur sleuth (Local Knowledge, 1995), has two compelling reasons to get to the bottom of the mystery pronto: to change Msgr. Neumann's mind about Jackie before the clock ticks down on the ripening corpse, and to clear himself in time to hit the links, even if it means revealing some home truths about the man he's trying to reconcile posthumously to the Holy Mother Church.

Kieran does both handsomely, with surprising grace and style, even though the case winds down so abruptly that golf fans (whose ranks Daly is bound to enlarge) will find more to cheer than mystery mavens.