The Last Kind Words
Tom Piccirilli
Bantam
trade paper $15.00
ebook $4.99 Kindle Nook

My reviewing schedule is in complete disarray, and it’s Tom Piccirilli’s fault. You see, I’d intended to start this novel sometime next month. But then I found myself with a brief bit of unexpected time on my hands. I had my phone with me, which of course has multiple ereader apps on it. I thought I’d check out the first few paragraphs.

Bad idea. Or rather, good idea. I was hooked. That science fiction novel, the one that came out last week that I’d intended to have the review up by release day? I’ve only read two chapters. The ARC of the forthcoming horror anthology with the really impressive lineup? Haven’t gotten to it. The collection for the next installment of Six Weeks of Scares I’m doing over at Amazing Stories? Still need to finish it. The post for Dispatches From the Lone Star Front about Teddy Roosevelt recruiting the Rough Riders at the Menger Bar in San Antonio? Haven’t started on it yet.

Yes, The Last Kind Words is that good. It’s a high water mark in modern crime writing. The story opens with Terry (short for Terrier) Rand visiting his older brother Collie on death row. About five years ago, Collie went on a killing spree one night, then turned himself in. No one has ever learned why, and Collie, thoroughly unrepentant, isn’t giving any explanations.

After his brother killed a bunch of innocent people, Terry fled Long Island for a ranch out west. He hoped to go straight. Terry came from a long line of grifters and petty thieves and wanted to leave the life. Somehow his family found him, because he gets a call saying to come home, his brother has something he only wants to say to Terry.

That something is that Collie didn’t kill one of the people he was convicted of killing. Or so he says. Terry doesn’t know what to believe. Collie was always running games on him. Now he’s telling Terry there may be a serial killer out there.

So Terry comes home, back to his family, his father Pinsch (short for Pinscher), his uncles Mal (short for Malamute) and Grey (short for Greyhound), and his younger sister Dale (short for Airedale). Did I mention that everyone in the family is named after a breed of dog?

The premise of a death row killer who isn’t guilty of one of the crimes of which he’s accused and wanting someone to track down the real murderer isn’t exactly new. But Piccirilli breathes fresh life into the trope.

It’s the family dynamics that make this novel work. There’s Terry’s immediate family, where his mother is the strength that holds everyone together. There’s the teenage rebellion of Dale, who is getting involved with a hood who’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. There’s the spectre of Alzheimer’s hanging over the men, as the patriarch Gramps slips deeper and deeper into dementia. There Terry’s high school sweetheart and former fiance, now married to his best friend and a mother herself.  There’s the toll a life of crime takes and the stresses that it puts on a family.

The characters all have their quirks, but they also have fears and hangups that bring them to life and flesh them out. This novel didn’t go in the directions I thought it would. There were times when I was certain I knew what was about to happen. I was wrong every time. Yet, by the end I could see how Piccirilli had woven the threads to bring everything together at the end.

Terry Rand is flawed protagonist, one who is very much aware of his flaws and struggles to do something about them. He’s going to learn there are lines you cross and lines you don’t, that there are ties of blood that bind us for life and ties that need to be broken.

This isn’t just a crime novel. This is a book about family and the things we do for family that transcends genre to become literature. It’s one of the best noir novels I’ve read in a long time. The sequel The Last Whisper in the Dark is already out. It’s on my ereader.