Dead Man's Bridge: A New Mystery
Robert Mrazek’s new novel, Dead Man’s Bridge, is a fun, if flawed, murder mystery set in a local college town. Jake Cantrell is a disgraced ex-Army officer with a menial job as a campus security officer at a small Upstate New York college, an aging dog he adores, and a boss he can’t stand. When a bigwig donor is found hanging from a bridge over Fall Creek Gorge just before Alumni Weekend, nearly everyone concludes that it was a suicide, especially after it comes to light that the man, Dennis Wheatley, had a terminal cancer diagnosis that he hadn’t disclosed to anyone, including his wife, and a blood alcohol content nearly twice the legal limit.
Jake, however, isn’t so sure. And when the president of the college—an old friend with whom he has a complicated history—is blackmailed for five million dollars of a secret endowment from the dead man, he’s sure that the two cases are connected. What follows is a breakneck investigation that carries him from shady low-rent motels to the upper echelons of millionaire donors, and dredges up dark secrets from the college’s history—and from the histories of several men whom Jake admires.
As a writer of plot, Mrazek is excellent; while the narrative slogs a bit in the early chapters, it soon picks up speed, and the author skillfully weaves together the disparate threads that Jake Cantrell is investigating into a nail-biting conclusion. As a writer of character, however, he leaves something to be desired. Jake is clearly intended to be the sort of hard-bitten noir character whose sullen surface conceals hidden depths, but he often comes across as petty, unpleasant, and self-absorbed. Scenes that are meant to show his wit and rakishness often miss the mark, and many of his interactions with female characters are downright cringe-inducing (an intern tells him, apropos of nothing, that he looks like a young Harrison Ford and goggles at him when he quips about being related; his female supervisors and coworkers are hidebound incompetents, hysterically oversensitive, or both, and he treats them all with a casual contempt that is extremely off-putting). Indeed, most of the characters are either worshipful or pointlessly antagonistic toward Jake in a way that makes the heavy hand of the author uncomfortably clear; rare is the interaction that is allowed to unfold naturally. His most interesting relationship by far is with the elderly dog that he rescued in Afghanistan.
Still, the mystery engages where the characters do not, and Mrazek is skilled at sketching out descriptions and setting the scene in quick, vivid prose that doesn’t distract from the fast-paced plot. Elements of the town (the novel is set in Groton, New York) are fictionalized, but Mrazek retains plenty of familiar elements that local readers will certainly recognize, from the walking bridges with their history as the loci of college suicides to the deadly grandeur of the gorges themselves. The tension between college students and locals will also be familiar to anyone who’s spent much time in a college town.
Mrazek does seem to be finding his footing with his characters by the latter half of the book; when they are given space to breathe, some of their interactions manage to be poignant, particularly those involving an Army veteran who was Jake’s beloved mentor back when he was in the ROTC, now an old man who is slowly drinking himself to death. While it is somewhat uneven, Dead Man’s Bridge is an engaging introduction to Mrazek’s new series, and it will be interesting to see where he takes Jake Cantrell from here. Well worth reading for anyone looking for a quick mystery with some local flavor.
Robert Mrazek is a former five-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives and the author of ten books, as well as the writer and co-director of the feature film The Congressman. He lives in Upstate New York.
