Too Beautiful to Die. - book review

Black Issues Book Review, May-June, 2003 by Robert Fleming

by Glenville Lovell Putnam, July 2003 $23.95, ISBN 0-399-15048-X

In the best detective stories, there are challenges and obstacles that the hero feels he cannot overcome because of personality conflicts, external responsibilities or moral questions. Glenville Lovell's Too Beautiful to Die presents its protagonist, Blades Overstreet, a former New York City policeman, with a combination of all three as he tries to wait out a cash settlement from a botched buy-and-bust operation that resulted in him getting shot and seriously wounded. The shooter is the sole white member of his investigative crew, a blatant white racist who is cleared of all wrongdoing by a department that does not want to see any racial incident smeared across the front page of the city's tabloids. Overstreet is put out to pasture.

While on the road to recuperation, Overstreet is approached by the white cabbie--who saved his life during the shooting, by placing him in his car and racing him to the hospital--with a job to locate the father of a beautiful actress friend, Precious. The actress offers the black cop $50,000 to accompany her to a man with information about her long-missing father, but the meeting goes awry and the informant is found brutally murdered, surrounded by a slew of child photos. Overstreet, scorn by the cops and the mayor, is made a key suspect in the killing of the man, a FBI agent. And he must find out the motive for the murder, as well as assist the actress determined to find her father.

The caper, written in lush, rich language, gains its strength from Lovell's depiction of the supporting cast: a shrewd congresswoman, an ex-cop pimp, the loyal friend, treacherous cops and federal agents, a reluctant wife on the lam, and a man bent on exacting revenge on Overstreet for jailing him and setting him up for a vicious gang-rape in prison that left him with the HIV virus. As Too Beautiful to Die winds down to a surprising conclusion, the reader is thrown a series of turns and twists that startle and shock until the last page. Compared to Nabokov and Morrison, Lovell has concocted a literate mystery that reminds the reader of the best of Cain, Hammett, Chandler and James Lee Burke, sleuthing rendered with wit, imagination and a Caribbean flair.

--Robert Fleming is the author of The African American Writer's Handbook and The Wisdom of the Elders; and the editor of After Hours: A Collection of Erotic Writing by Black Men.