The Cues finds teacher Pat Riordan settling into a new post at the local university. Having exonerated himself a year earlier as a suspect in a missing persons case, Riordan is asked by a colleague’s widow to look into her husband’s death—and so, reluctantly, Riordan once again finds himself in the fold of a who-done-it case.
Teaming up with another colleague Phil Rister and former homicide detective Mike Finn, who has returned to the Midwest to find answers to the three-decades-old murder of his cousin, the trio follow leads connecting the old murder to the present-day death of Riordan’s colleague and a series of unsolved cases of missing women. The connections they make, which they come to call the cues, take them into the dark underbelly of the college town they thought they knew and the powerful forces behind it.
The Cues is the third novel in the Pat Riordan series, following Bricked and The Slip Swing.
The Cues finds teacher Pat Riordan settling into a new post at the local university. Having exonerated himself a year earlier as a suspect in a missing persons case, Riordan is asked by a colleague’s widow to look into her husband’s death—and so, reluctantly, Riordan once again finds himself in the fold of a who-done-it case.
Teaming up with another colleague Phil Rister and former homicide detective Mike Finn, who has returned to the Midwest to find answers to the three-decades-old murder of his cousin, the trio follow leads connecting the old murder to the present-day death of Riordan’s colleague and a series of unsolved cases of missing women. The connections they make, which they come to call the cues, take them into the dark underbelly of the college town they thought they knew and the powerful forces behind it.
The Cues is the third novel in the Pat Riordan series, following Bricked and The Slip Swing.
It was the first week of the winter semester and I was hovering over my desk packing up for my ten- thirty, when Phil Rister poked his head in. Eyes reddened, he reached across my desk and handed over the Echo Times.
“Figured you hadn’t heard; know you don’t read newspapers,” he said. “I called and texted, but you never answer your phone.”
“Forgot to charge the thing.”
An above-the-fold headline jumped out: “Popular Prof, 61, Dies.”
“Oh my God.” I sat. A picture showed a pearl-toothed Joe, white politician hair. A sidebar outlined accomplishments: PhD, author of ten textbooks, marathon runner. “Fuck… When… What happened? Not a virus thing?”
Rister drew up my blind to a view of an iron-cast sky and the campus mall below. His voice cracked. “No. Over the weekend. As only Joe would do, he had propped up the ladder to an attic opening to clean it out, or something, and fell back, the ladder with him, and fractured some ribs.
“Kate rushed him to the hospital. They wrapped him up and were about to send him home, but the doctors advised to keep him for observation over the weekend. But apparently something happened in the middle of the night and he went into cardiac arrest. That was it.”
I looked at the picture of the man I’d known over a decade, svelte for his age and always willing to give another space to talk. “I can’t believe it. How is Kate?”
Rister rubbed off a dust bunny from the windowsill. “As good as she can be. She said Joe didn’t want us to know he was in the hospital because he thought we’d be over there hassling the nurses.” He took out a cloth hanky from his coat and dabbed his eyes. We let the news between us settle in.
I read the paper for any mention of cause of death. Nothing. “Was an autopsy done?”
“I don’t know. But there was a double whammy; when they all came back from the funeral home talking about preparations, they found their home had been broken into.”
“Oh no.”
“Kate said she didn’t notice anything, no window broken or door jimmied, until she went into Joe’s study and found drawers open and papers strewn about. Joe always kept a clean ship, so she knew someone had been tinkering with his things. The kids said they hadn’t been in the study.”
“He was planning his retirement.”
“Yeah, just wanted to get the project going first,” Rister said, dabbing at another dust bunny, cording the blind down. “Best view in town, especially for an adjunct, even though they put you over here across campus, away from your department.” He picked up the frayed copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan on my desk. “Tough stuff. Old English?” he said, digressing from the tragedy at hand.
“Uh, more for show than anything.”
“What was it Hobbes said about man’s life, something about it being brutish and short?”
“Something like that.” We nodded about the appropriateness of the adage.
“You have a 10:30?”
“Yeah. Fuck… Poor Joe. I can’t believe it.”
I dropped my cell, an all too loaded-down Android with apps I didn’t use, in my canvas bag, along with a course syllabus and a voluminous third edition of The History of the Great Speakers. The futility of it all flooded in, admonishing me I was wasting precious time expounding upon what renowned people said about this and that. Both of us stopped at the picture of the foursome on my bookshelf, Joe in the middle, holding up the trophy for first place in last year’s scramble golf tournament.
For the past three years during the golf season, which in our part of the world was all too short, Joe had been part of the Friday afternoon foursome with me, Rister, and Issac Peterman. He had routinely birdied the seventh, a par five that sloped down like a ski run. Being versed in hitting a downhill lie, something Joe was forever schooling us in, was needed if you ever wanted to hit the green that sat like a lighthouse above a cavernous gulch some five hundred yards from the tee box. It was the hardest hole on the course, and if you finished it with a bogey six, your day was made.
Rister touched the photograph. “We should still take the trip across the pond for the Open, like Joe wanted us to do.”
At my door, I fumbled for keys. “The project,” I said. “He just was getting that going for the department. Who is going to head that up? What is it called?”
“The Cold Case Project. Mostly related to missing persons. Looks like yours truly,” Rister said. “He was real excited about it. Patterned, at least from an investigative journalism perspective, after Northwestern’s Innocence Project.”
“Medill School of Journalism?”
“Right. Barry Scheck, the lawyer, is also a co-founder there, I think.”
We took the stairway down. Outside we stood in awkward silence.
“I’ll let you know what else I find out,” Rister said, adjusting his scarf into his coat and dropping his chin onto the lining as a wind gust blew across the mall. He rolled up the newspaper and tucked it under his arm. We hugged. His eyes watered up. He headed toward the Memorial Union, where we met most days for lunch, to tell those who hadn’t heard.
“Let’s get him a bench or something on the seventh hole,” he yelled back.
I pulled up the collar of my navy pea, dug out my Connemara walking cap from a holey pocket, and burrowed myself in, making a mental note to call Joe’s wife and get the specifics of what happened. I didn’t mention to Rister that Joe had talked to me about the cold case course. He thought my past life experiences might be useful from a practical sense about solving crime.
A plastic cup cartwheeled across the cobblestone walk. I deposited it in the nearby trash can, but not before examining the personalized image of a woman in high heels, scantily clad in a negligee. A caption read “Jasper’s Gentlemen’s Club.” Visits I’d made there with Issac Peterman blew across my radar screen. We’d always invited Joe, but he’d always turned us down. The Union Tower bell chimed ten times. I’d be early to class for a change. Tears welled up.
In the American Midwest most colleges had reopened following another lifting of the Coronavirus shutdown mandate, but attendance was not back to par, when campuses had bustled with students. Many were still opting for online courses. Some students attending classes wore nose-to-chin masks. Colorful Jesse James-like bandanas, Black Lives Matter, and an assortment of Save the Whales headgear boldly told others who you were.
I made it to my building, a red-brick, four-story, Civil War era. The only way up was by stairs. Somewhere up the flight I heard girl-talk. Talks—that was what I’d miss most about Joe. Being fifteen years the senior of the group, he’d always thrown out tidbits and truisms as our foursome made its way up and down the hills and in and out of the weeds on those Friday afternoons. It was Joe who always coaxed us into walking the course.
“If I can do it, you lads can,” he’d say, scolding us for being too soft. At the turn, the end of the first nine holes, he’d say, “Dara gaoth, dara gaoth,” loosely translated from Gaelic as “second wind.” And off we’d go for the next nine, like plebes following an upperclassman, sweating beads.
I entered my classroom to the smiles of two coeds, who looked just out of high school. One was masked and listening to the other, unmasked and chattering a mile a minute. A young man with a wannabe beard, conducting business on a gadget yoked to his right hand, momentarily checked me out, then returned to his pacifier.
“Is this History of the Great Speakers?” one girl asked.
“It is.” I wrote out my name on the board with a stub of chalk and sat on the desk. I took a chair as a footrest and waited to see who else would show.
The roster had twenty, which was all I had told my department head I could take for this type of course, which I wanted to be discussion-based. There was a paper clip attachment to my roster from my department chair noting those students who wanted to do the class online and Zoom with the professor.
Two more males showed who had that jock swagger and sat in back-row seats, followed by a well-put-together older coed dressed to the nines. She took a seat up front, close enough for me to whiff her perfume, a lavender extract.
I listened for any sounds coming up the stairs, then said, “Let’s get started,” even though less than half the roster had showed up.
My opening-day sermon laid out what was expected of them and what was expected of me. I then dismissed them a half hour early. It was Tuesday and I didn’t have anything scheduled the rest of the day. It would be noon soon. I would need to call Joe’s wife. But I needed something to quell the afternoon melancholia that was sure to set in.
Pat Riordan’s colleague Joe dies unexpectedly in hospital following a fall. He is approached by Kate, the grieving widow, at the funeral to look into the death as she feels it is suspicious due to a letter she found among his belongings.
Pat is a university lecturer who was supposed to help Joe and another colleague Phil set up a new syllabus which would involve getting students to investigate missing person cold cases.
As Pat, Phil & former homicide detective Mike Finn put their heads together to look at old cases they start to make connections or ‘cues’ which propel them into a decades old conspiracy of murder and misdirection. Could Joe have stumbled on a deadly secret?
What I loved about this mystery was the way the author made the characters, both main and minor, full of personality and easily identifiable. So many books make the mistake of having too many two dimensional additional headcount with very similar names and traits making them difficult to differentiate.
What also stands out is the author’s ability to bring to the table his knowledge of his previous experience both as a teacher and within the criminal justice system to give the plot and the characters a realistic edge.
The plot is nicely merged with the character’s personal lives although everything that happens eventually ties into the case at some point.
If anything, a few extra red herrings could be thrown in to put the reader off the scent and the use of a more subtle flag for key points to put off the moment when the reader pieces the clues, or should that be cues, together just ahead of Pat himself.
The story starts off really strong and finishes with a flourish but slows down a bit in the middle due mainly to a fair amount of superfluous debate and discussion around the connections and clues.
Pat Riordan is a nicely developed character which probably comes from having two outings already in Bricked and The Slip Swing
So, to sum up - great characters, a decent plot and a good ending which could possibly be improved with dropping a few thousand words in the middle to keep the story fresh and flowing.
Overall I enjoyed the story and I’m happy to award it 3 and a half stars – Probably 4 stars had the final word count been trimmed a little to maintain the early promise.