Review: "Providence Rag: A Liam Mulligan Novel" by Bruce DeSilva

Liam Mulligan, investigative reporter for The Providence Dispatch newspaper has come a long way since June 1992. Back then he was a young reporter working the sports beat who, by the luck of the draw and the fact that no one else was available, was forced into helping cover from the start one of the worst murder cases in the history of Rhode Island. A case that ultimately resulted in the very justified conviction of a killer who is definitively going to kill again if he ever gets out.

In the spring of 2012 that release is looking more and more likely. Not only is the killer going to get out, Mulligan probably will see that happen very soon as well as the death of his employer, The Providence Dispatch. Newspapers are a dying industry thanks to a population that either reads online or doesn't read at all. Mulligan knows the end is near every time he walks into the nearly empty newsroom and considers all the empty workstations, but looking for a new job isn't a high priority right now. Mulligan instead is focused on the case and the huge ethical dilemma it has created.  It seems increasingly clear that prison officials were fabricating charges to keep the killer behind bars beyond his original sentence because the laws passed by the legislature were never ever designed to handle this unique situation. If prison officials really could make up charges and did so the obvious implication is that they could do it again with somebody else. Where does the public’s all-encompassing right to know about corruption and other matters fit into this situation? Beyond the thorny issue of what they did, if it did happen and Mulligan and possibly other reporters write about it, all heck is going to break loose with the most likely result in a killer being released to kill again. A killer who, no doubt, is far smarter about how to do what he wants to do without getting caught than when he went in all those years ago.

Inspired by two famous Rhode Island murder cases, Providence Rag: A Liam Mulligan Novel is the third book in the very good Liam Mulligan series. While Mulligan is getting older and maybe wiser---through that is questionable--- he is certainly more and more aware of the fact that he is the last of his breed in a dying industry. The obvious question as to who is going to expose corrupt politicians and flawed government actions when newspapers are gone is one that comes up again here as well as the ethics in reporting all that one knows about a situation.

This latest in the series is another good one from author Bruce DeSilva. Shifting in time from various dates in 1989 to 2012 the complicated read features further development of many characters as well as an illustrative history of what is being lost as the newspaper industry dies before our eyes. The world has changed a lot in those years and readers are reminded of those changes as the book works its way through and increasingly suspenseful situation on various fronts. Based on real life events with names and other details fictionalized Providence Rag: A Liam Mulligan novel, like the preceding two books Rogue Island and Cliff Walk, is absolutely well worth your time.

Providence Rag: A Liam Mulligan Novel

Bruce DeSilva

http://www.brucedesilva.com

Forge (A Tom Doherty Associates Book)

http://www.tor-forge.com

March 2014

ISBN #978-0-7653-7429-5

Hardback (also available in e-book)

304 Pages

$25.99

ARC was provided by the author for my use in an objective review.

Bruce DeSilva was a participant in the Sunday Sample series here on the blog back in February and you can read his piece here if you are so inclined.

Kevin R. Tipple ©2014

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Sample Sunday: Bruce DeSilva

Another Sunday and another author whom I am honored to know and be a part of things here. Author of Rogue Island (reviewed here) and Cliff Walk (reviewed here) I was amazed and absolutely thrilled when he wanted to contribute something in advance of his new novel Providence Rag currently scheduled for release on March 11. Instead of the normal sample from a book, author Bruce DeSilva wanted to do something a little different. I was not about to say no.

Like most newspaper professionals these days, Liam Mulligan, a fictional investigative reporter at The Providence Dispatch, fears the future. 

The paper’s longtime-owners, a group of wealthy Rhode Island families who have controlled the Dispatch since the Civil War, always ran the place as a public service. For decades, they held out against the nationwide trend of local owners selling out to chains, and Mulligan has been grateful for that. But now, after too many years of declining circulation and advertising, the owners have reluctantly put the paper on the market. And the only suitor is a bottom-feeding media conglomerate that cares about nothing but the bottom line.

Mulligan is a wisecracking tough guy. Not much phases him. But he shudders when he thinks about what’s coming. For him, investigative reporting has always been a calling—like the priesthood but without the sex. But he’s in his forties now, and he knows his days as a newspaperman are numbered. He doubts he could ever be any good at anything else.

For where he sits, other metropolitan newspapers aren’t much of an option. Nearly all of them, hemorrhaging readers and revenue, have become mere shells of the vital institutions they once were. And few of them are hiring. They are laying people off. 

Television news and online news websites don’t look like much of an option either. Network television news departments, never all that great to begin with, have shriveled into irrelevance. Twenty-four-hour cable news channels spew endless loops of trivial celebrity gossip, provide soap boxes for blowhards, and poison the public discourse with partisan distortions and misinformation. And the handful of internet news websites striving to be more than propaganda organs for the left and right lack the revenue streams required to cover the news with breadth and depth. 

Mulligan, the protagonist of my Edgar Award-winning series of hardboiled crime novels, sees nothing on the horizon to replace newspapers as honest brokers of information. He’s appalled at how much damage their demise is doing to the American democracy.

If I were younger, I’d be in the same fix Mulligan is in. In recent years, I grew weary of being part of a rear-guard action and dispirited over the inevitability of the journalism’s decline. But I fought the good fight. The last major project I oversaw as a senior Associated Press editor, an investigative series about the exploitation of child gold miners in Africa, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. But five years ago, when the AP offered an early retirement package—part of its own retrenchment in the face of economic pressures—I decided it was time for a second act.

I’m a full-time novelist now, and the third novel in my Mulligan crime series, Providence Rag, will be published in hardcover and e-book editions on March 11.  The book has already received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Booklist. 

In each Mulligan novel, my protagonist shows his grit by investigating crime and corruption in the state of his birth. In Rogue Island, he investigates an arson spree that is destroying the working class Providence, R.I., neighborhood where he was raised. In Cliff Walk, he investigates political corruption that has allowed the state’s rampant sex trade to thrive. And in Providence Rag, he and the entire state struggle with the ethical dilemma of what to do about a psychopath who is being held in prison on phony charges because he is too dangerous to be set loose. 

I want my novels to be enjoyed as suspenseful entertainment—but they are also about something more. It is my hope that as readers follow the skill and dedication with which Mulligan pursues the truth under increasingly difficult circumstances, they will gain a greater appreciation for what all of us are losing as newspapers fade into history.

Bruce DeSilva ©2014

Bruce DeSilva grew up in a tiny Massachusetts mill town where the mill closed when he was ten. He had an austere childhood bereft of iPods, X-Boxes, and all the other cool stuff that hadn’t been invented yet. I this parochial little town, metaphors and alliteration were also in short supply. Nevertheless, his crime fiction has won the Edgar and Macavity Awards; has been listed as a finalist for the Shamus, Anthony, and Barry Awards; and has been published in ten foreign languages. His short stories have appeared in Akashic Press's award-winning noir anthologies. He has reviewed books for The New York Times Sunday Book Review and Publishers Weekly, and his reviews for The Associated Press have appeared in hundreds of other publications. Previously, he was a journalist for forty years, most recently as writing coach world-wide for AP, editing stories that won nearly every major journalism prize including the Pulitzer. He and his wife, the poet Patricia Smith, live in New Jersey with two enormous dogs named Brady and Rondo.