Deception Pass is the tenth Thomas Black mystery by Earl Emerson. The books are suspenseful PI novels set within the framework of the relationship between Thomas, a quick-witted, smart-mouthed private investigator and his best friend, Kathy Birchfield. The friendship between the two will feel familiar to anyone who has had a very good friend of the opposite sex and who has wondered, at times during that friendship, whether it could deepen into something romantic.In early Thomas Black books, Thomas and Kathy's friendship provides both context and subplot. Then in the third book, "Yellow Dog Party," the relationship shifts and leads into "The Portland Laugher," where it takes center stage. "Laugher" is Emerson's darkest, most complex book, sending the reader on an emotional roller coaster that ends satisfyingly in the following book, "The Vanishing Smile."
Two books later, though, you might wonder what else there is to say. In "Deception Pass," Thomas and Kathy are happily married. Neither has an incurable disease, has been kidnapped or is cheating on the other. So now what? Must we just to do without the funny verbal sparring, the sexual tension, that has characterized the other books?
Happily, the answer is no. In "Deception Pass," Thomas and Kathy have settled into the kind of easy relationship they had in the first books, except that Kathy lives upstairs with Thomas instead of downstairs in the basement apartment, and they fool around occasionally.
One October morning, Kathy brings Thomas a new client. The client is Lainie Smith, Seattle's "Mother Theresa with a bankroll," as Thomas puts it. Lainie is being blackmailed by someone who claims Lainie was involved in a grisly multiple homicide that took place in a cabin at Deception Pass more than seventeen years ago.
Although she claims she wasn't involved, Lainie admits that as a teenager she knew a drifter named Charlie Groth, the man who was ultimately convicted of the murders and recently executed. She's terrified the blackmailer will reveal her past as a runaway and a drug addict, a past she has been trying to attone for ever since.
At Kathy's urging, Thomas takes the case. His investigation leads him to the original cast of characters involved in Groth's apprehension, trial and twelve-year-long appeal. Although, each one knows about the mystery woman Groth claimed actually committed the murders, none of them has been able to find her--not now and not seventeen years ago when the crime was committed. Or so they say.
When his chief suspect in the blackmailing is found murdered, Thomas realizes he's caught up in a series of lies nearly twenty years old. With growing doubts about even his own client, he continues to sift through the layers of deception to uncover the truth about what happened that night at Deception Pass. What he finds forces him to reexamine not only Charlie Groth and Lainie Smith's concept of guilt and innocence, but his own.
Deception Pass is an excellent book in an excellent series. I highly recommend it.
