Additional points: this is a noir-ish mystery, and the narrator is a tough, hard-boiled private detective; the story is set in what seems to be the 1930s, though various bits are ahistorical or just vague.
Would anyone expect or want that narrator to be still standing, smoking a cigarette calmly and bantering with the requisite fat cops, on the last page?
Because - SPOILER ALERT - he is. Antonio Mercer is our hero here, and absolutely no one has killed him.
That's disappointing, because otherwise Killed Me is an atmospheric, twisty story - although it's clumsy in a number of ways, some more annoying that others - that generally plays fair with its genre and delivers on its promises. Mercer is a big mook with a sense of justice and a complicated relationship with both the cops and the local swanky set. (Both of those things are teased, but don't really get resolved or explained.)
A woman walks into his office - and the narrative refuses to tell us her name for at least twenty pages, the entire first issue (where I stopped looking) - to hire him to look into the disappearance of her sister, Julie, who ran away on the eve of her big society wedding. Eventually, the book gives the other sister a first name - Jessica - and the family a last name - Roman. The parents are supposedly important movers and shakers in this town that's never specified, but we don't see them, and Mercer works entirely for Jessica. (We also don't see him getting paid, or discussing his fees, or anything else having to do with his income. Good thing he is a slumming rich boy!)
Now, next is what I'd call the most unfortunate mistake of the book. Jessica and Julie are close in age, and apparently look almost identical. It's not quite clear, but I gather that Julie is blonde and Jessica is a redhead, so the way we should be able to tell them apart is by their hair color.
This is a black and white book.
Jessica is on the cover, so we at least understand why Mercer keeps calling her Red. (Unless it's because he's also forgotten her name, since the narrative neglected to mention it.)
As a former editor, I was itching to call for a different flashback to open the book: something from the days when Mercer was part of the rich-people world, maybe dating one of these women as he's implied to have done, and showing both of them together so that he can contrast them and the reader can see who they are.
We don't get anything like that, which is unfortunate. We do get Mercer chasing Julie's trail, shaking down her feckless gambler fiancée and then mixing with the mob-boss both Julie and the fiancée were involved with. It's a noir plot: Mercer drives around town in a big, boxy car, pushes his hat back up on his head, cracks wise to a whole lot of people, gets punched or worse multiple times, and gradually learns dangerous, unpleasant truths.
There are some good secrets at the bottom of Killed Me's plot, and the chase is satisfying. It works mostly well, as a noir, but those missteps are central and hard to work around, unfortunate choices made at the beginning that harm the book overall.
I see I've been picking on writer Jamie S. Rich's work - though I should mention this book was originally published in 2008; it's from pretty early in his career, and he's done a lot of good stuff since then - but neglected to say much about artist Joëlle Jones. She uses areas of black well - always a major asset in a noir - though some of her faces, and especially the more extreme expressions, are a bit mid-Aughts Indy, which I found a little distracting. Mercer is drawn so that some of the time it looks like he has a soul patch, for example.
So Killed Me is pretty good: possibly annoying for readers who are bothered by the kinds of things I mentioned, but professional and generally doing what readers want a noir to do.
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