My Darling Detective

Before a stunned audience, she flings an open jar of black ink at master photographer Robert Capa’s “Death on a Leipzig Balcony. ” Jacob’s police detective fiancée, Martha Crauchet, is assigned to the ensuing interrogation.

In My Darling Detective, Howard Norman delivers a fond nod to classic noir, as Jacob’s understanding of the man he has always assumed to be his father unravels against the darker truth of Robert Emil, a Halifax police officer suspected but never convicted of murdering two Jewish residents during the shocking upswing of anti-Semitism in 1945.  The denouement, involving a dire shootout and an emergency delivery—it’s the second Rigolet to be born in the Halifax Free Library in a span of three decades—is Howard Norman at his “provocative. . . haunting”* and uncannily moving best. - Janet Maslin, New York Times