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Mirror Image (2010)

by Dennis Palumbo(Favorite Author)

3.51 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

1590587529 (ISBN13: 9781590587522)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Poisoned Pen Press

series

Daniel Rinaldi

review 1: Years ago I discovered that I love thrillers and the better written and circuitously plotted, the faster I consume the story. I don't even attempt to solve the mystery. I'm just along for the ride and what a ride "Mirror Image" is! The last book I read, a memoir, took me a month; this book barely lasted three days!Author Dennis Palumbo has come up with an angle that will keep me hooked. Besides being set in Pittsburgh, where I lived at one time, his narrator Dr. Daniel Rinaldi is a psychologist who consults with the Police on difficult cases. Surrounded by interesting characters who don't always behave normally, Dr. Rinaldi ends up in all kinds of trouble.With great dialogue, fascinating characters, and sense of place, you won't have any trouble seeing this as a movie.And ... morealthough there is the requisite violence and sex, Palumbo knows when to back off and let the reader's imagination take over.Luckily Palumbo has already followed up his debut title with a second Rinaldi tale called "Fever Dream". Find them. Read them. Then join me in awaiting the third installment.
review 2: A troubled youth in want of a new image dresses like his psychiatrist, narrator Dr. Daniel Rinaldi, and ends up being killed. At first it is believed that the murder target is Rinaldi himself, that this is a case of mistaken identity. Determined to find out who is responsible for this and who may want to do away with him next, Rinaldi decides to investigate and help the Pittsburgh police. Things get troubled and muddled soon. There are clues, sure, but many of them are false. There are characters, I mean, real characters. Unpredictable, moody, gloomy, or all at once, that give the novel its dark, heavy atmosphere. Translated into cinema, this could become a film noir. Perhaps too noir? Possibly because Palumbo is by training a psychotherapist, the prose here is imbibed with a density that seldom lets go. Now, intensity is good, suspense is good, tortured characters are good. So is a thick forest. But once in a while the reader needs a clearing, a place for rest and relaxed breathing. And there are few of those in Mirror Image. The plot itself might be a little too convoluted , with too many false clues. Had Palumbo extended his novel to about fifty more pages, plots and subplots could have formed into more distinct patterns instead of packing up into an obsessive bundle, and the convolution itself wouldn’t have been a problem. Ultimately, what saves the novel is not the love story in my opinion. I really don’t like Daniel Rinaldi’s love interest, her extenuating circumstances notwithstanding. These actually seem to come as a late change of mind, as if Palumbo had thought of her as the villain at first then chosen someone else in the end. No, what saves the novel are some of its characters (My favorite: grouchy, macho, yet vulnerable Harry Polk from the Pittsburgh Police), the solid dialogues. Mostly the rawness in tone and language. Rawness, as in honesty with a razor blade. At its best, it reaches the entrails. This is naturalism reborn. Zola would approve the undertaking. Keep the rawness and simplify the plot in the next novel. Chances are the combo may produce a great read instead of a good one. That’s my advice to Dennis Palumbo whose ability as a fiction writer is definitely real, on this and that side of the mirror. less

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