Read in January 2014
Crime of Privilege, by Walter Walker
Two stars
I was jazzed when I saw that Walter Walker had a new book coming out after 20 years of silence. While I hadn’t loved all of his earlier novels, his first — A Dime To Dance By — made it onto my Top 10 mysteries list. The fact that Crime of Privilege takes place on Cape Cod, where I lived for a time in the late 1970s, only added to my interest. However, I did not love this novel. The main character, George Becket, is an assistant district attorney who has been rewarded with a job for failing to tell the whole truth about a sexual assault he witnessed in the Palm Beach mansion of a Massachusetts political dynasty while a college senior. Many years later, he goes rogue to investigate an unsolved murder that may be connected to the political family he has protected for so long. I found Becket unlikeable, which was my first problem with the novel. In addition, he wasn’t much of an investigator, running off to Hawaii and Costa Rica to track to witnesses to interview but not bothering to interview those still on the cape until their existence/location was pointed out by someone else. So while all the elements were there for a solid mystery — interesting crime, interesting characters, interesting difficulties — the weakness of the central character and his handling/bungling of the investigation undermined the story. But the capper for me was Walker’s decision to use two actual crimes connected to the Kennedy family — the 1975 murder of Martha Moxley for which Kennedy cousin Michael Skakel was found guilty and the 1991 rape of a Palm Beach woman for which Kennedy cousin William Kennedy Smith was acquitted. At the end of the novel, very similar crimes remain unsolved and the story ends with a lot of yadda-yadda-yadda about the privileged corrupting the justice system and getting away with murder and much more. In reality, the privileged were charged with crimes, tried for those crimes, and subject to a jury’s verdict. That 180 degree switcheroo bugged me a lot.