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Just a short drive down the highway from my home lies the city of Lowell, Massachusetts. It’s an old, industrial city for the most part -- one that I remember for its confusing one-way streets and its minor-league hockey team. It’s also the home of David Daniel’s fictional private investigator, Alex Rasmussen.
Rasmussen’s hometown was one of the first things that drew me to The Skelly Man, but it was the story that kept me turning the pages. In The Skelly Man, Rasmussen is hired by Jerry Corbin, a late-night TV talk show host who’s planning to boost his slowly-sinking career by returning to Lowell, his hometown, to launch his new project -- a remake of The Gong Show -- at the local college. Corbin has been receiving strange but not exactly threatening notes, and he needs Rasmussen to get to the bottom of it before something happens to the show—and Corbin’s career.
As the excitement for the new show builds, Rasmussen starts to dig up all kinds of clues that lead him in all kinds of directions -- an old professor who’s angry about the new show taking away rehearsal time from his new theatrical performance, a woman who’s attacked (and discovered by Corbin’s assistant), and some bad blood with another east coast college.
The Skelly Man only gets better as the story continues. Daniel plays a game with his readers -- taking them through a maze of twists and turns and dead ends. Each new clue that’s discovered could be a step in the right direction or a decoy to throw you off the scent. And while I was somewhat disappointed by the story’s complicated conclusion, I enjoyed the mental journey it took to get there.
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