Marshall Karp has made a name for himself by being funny. The cop shop badinage between his Los Angeles detective pairing of Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs was the central feature of his first two highly entertaining novels, The Rabbit Factory and Bloodthirsty.
Given that the plot of his third, Flipping Out, centres around the search for a serial killer knocking off the wives of cops, and that Biggs' wife may well be on his list, it is not surprising that Karp turns the humour down a notch. It's hard to be funny when your wife is in fear of her life.
But fortunately it is only one notch as Biggs respectfully refrains from his usual wisecracking demeanour and in turn slips into a bleak, black humour while Lomax plays his regular straight man role to perfection.
Detective fiction is not always renowned for the quality of its dialogue, but Karp's expertise in television writing is deployed to great effect in Flipping Out - which is good because dialogue dominates - and combined with an inventive and entertaining plot, it contributes to another cracking outing for Lomax and Biggs.
Flipping Out refers to the real estate practice of buying homes to "flip" them, ie taking a wreck, renovating and decorating it and selling it on for a profit. The flipping is being done by a group of cops' wives, including Mrs Biggs, which works on one house a year. The twist here - and being LA there has to be a twist - is that a mother of one of the wives is a best-selling thriller writer who features each renovated house as a murder scene in her new book. As a result the value of the house sky-rockets. The second twist - and being a thriller of course there is more than one twist - is that the flipping wives themselves start turning up dead. Lomax and Biggs get on the case.
As well as showing his excellence in dialogue, Karp confirms two other talents in this book. First, he has great command of his plot. The story sets itself for a grand finale with about half a dozen potential killers but keeps its secret to the very last. Second he is a tremendous technician. Almost every chapter finishes on a high note or a quip - often referencing something that has gone before. In other hands that sort of clever-clever technique could be irritating and wrong. But Karp has such charm and the writing is so good that it establishes a sort of mesmeric rhythm to the story that holds the reader.
In my case it meant I read the book in a little under 24 hours, a sure sign that I was enjoying myself. SO hats off to Marshall Karp for another funny, entertaining cop thriller. What more could you ask for?
To read Material Witness' interviews with Marshall, click here (July 2008) and here (August 2009).