Getting Away With Murder

New York Times Book Review

In the Cooperman books, the writing is excellent.

New Yorker

Benny is likable and resourceful and Mr. Engel hs conceived a classic (revenge and retribution) Ross Macdonald plot and a good one.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The eight previous adventures of Canadian PI Benny Cooperman (Murder Sees the Light, etc.) have garnered praise for their slick plotting and erudite prose. This time out, Engel's prose still hums, but the plot groans a bit. Despite a life of crime, Abe Wise has managed to escape serious trouble from the authorities. Now he's being shot at and, understandably, wants to know who's pulling the trigger and why. So Abe, with a skillful application of force and coercion, hires Benny. The tale opens with the grisly murder of Ed Neustadt, a retired cop. Later, as Benny reads about Neustadt in a true-crime book about a murder investigation that culminated in the execution of a possibly innocent young woman, he learns that no one, least of all Abe, liked Neustadt very much. Benny talks to Abe's two ex-wives and his two bitter children. He finds out that, back in the 1950s, when Abe was a lowly thief, Neustadt let him walk on a burglary charge. Part of what prevents this effort from rising to the heights of earlier Cooperman mysteries is that Engel paints the pivotal Abe strictly by the numbers, so that the old gangster never emerges as a memorable character. The plot is interesting in an abstract way, but it doesn't achieve enough tension to warrant the complex solution that Benny delivers at the close. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Three hoods abduct private investigator Benny Cooperman in the middle of the night and take him to see Abe Wise, Canada's most infamous unconvicted crook. Someone wants Wise dead, so Wise, using what has worked for him in the past, forces Benny to discover a name. Chief on the suspect list are Wise's two ex-wives (one alcoholic and one snobby) and two children (both spoiled), but Benny also interrogates Wise's old friend, his second-in-command, and a police contact. Pretty straightforward plotting, then, as well as direct prose, and a slight-but-steady whiff of Canadian atmosphere. A pleasant read for fans of the series.

Kirkus Reviews

Having dispatched a trio of strong silent types to Grantham p.i. Benny Cooperman's bedside to get his attention and deliver him to a previously unannounced meeting, Abram Wise, Canada's greatest unconvicted crook, tells Benny that somebody's been making a series of attempts on his life, and that Benny is hereby elected to head the killer off. Who wants to see Wise dead? Only his two ex-wives, waitress Paulette Staples and teacher Lilian Wise; their respective children, underachieving Hart Staples and clotheshorse Julie Wise; and half the Ontario constabulary. But Benny's attention fastens instead on a 40-year-old murder case his friend McKenzie Stewart has just written up in a true-crime book: the conviction of Mary Tatarski, the next-to-last woman to be executed in Canada after a second unseen burglar fortuitously killed her mother five years after a first break-in left her father dead—an especially timely case to be ventilating again since Ed Neustadt, the retired cop who headed the investigation that sent Mary to the gallows, has just given McStu's book a big publicity boost by getting himself murdered. Benny's return (A Victim Must Be Found, 1988, etc.) is an amiable retro puzzler marked by endless rounds of Q-and-A with the unmemorable suspects, much of it clever but none of it believable for a moment.