Mis­sion Flats (Dell 2003) by William Lan­day is a crime fic­tion novel that I read and enjoyed sev­eral years ago. I rec­om­mended this book to Maili some time back and asked her if she read it, would she mind doing a review for me? So, here we are…enjoy.

Mis­sions Flats opens with the narrator’s vivid descrip­tion of a preg­nant woman smil­ing as she relaxes on an air ring in the water under the sun. The nar­ra­tor then switches to a dif­fer­ent time and place where a Boston police offi­cer enters a sup­pos­edly closed bar late at night, not real­is­ing he’s about to face a hor­ror, which will set off a domino effect last­ing some thirty years.

Sets in present day, we learn that our nar­ra­tor is Ben Tru­man, the 24-year-old police chief of a small Maine town – Ver­sailles (cor­rect pro­nun­ci­a­tion: Ver-SALES). As he explains: dur­ing a home visit from the Uni­ver­sity of Boston where he’d been study­ing His­tory, he saw how Alzheimer’s was con­fus­ing and dis­tress­ing his mother and how hard his stern police chief father was strug­gling to cope.

He couldn’t bear see­ing his mother in dis­tress, not after what she did for him when he was grow­ing up; not while know­ing his father wouldn’t care for her the way Ben felt he should. So he quit the uni­ver­sity and returned home. He rea­soned he could always return to the uni­ver­sity once it was over. How­ever, shortly after she passed away, Ben’s father retired. The job no one wanted went to Ben, mak­ing him the youngest police chief in the country.

Ben isn’t happy with being a police chief as he didn’t want the job, but for rea­sons we will soon learn, had to accept. In spite of this, he speaks of leav­ing Ver­sailles for a bet­ter world out there, but he doesn’t fol­low it up. Locals seem to believe he wouldn’t ever leave, which both­ers Ben. He’s stuck in a place among a tan­gle of emo­tions; his grief over his late mother, his awk­ward­ness with his emo­tion­ally inac­ces­si­ble father, and his quiet resent­ment towards the job and life in Ver­sailles. So, why doesn’t he just leave, any­way? This is what made me read on.

While patrolling dur­ing one morn­ing, Ben finds a decom­pos­ing corpse in one of lake-side sum­mer cab­ins which he reg­u­larly checks every other month. He finds a piece of evi­dence that says this corpse is Robert Danziger, a pros­e­cu­tor from Boston. Ben noti­fies the big boys, who quickly arrive in Ver­sailles where they shove Chief Ben aside and take over the case.

He’s well aware they see him as a coun­try hick who couldn’t tell the dif­fer­ence between elbow and arse, but he doesn’t care. Because the Danziger mur­der took place in Ben’s region, he’s invited to sit in at case meet­ings as a mat­ter of cour­tesy. Almost an after­thought. He’s basi­cally expected to sit in and say nowt. Fine by him, Ben reckons.

In one case meet­ing, he learns the Boston police are con­vinced the prime sus­pect is Harold Brax­ton, the king of a noto­ri­ous run-down Boston area, Mis­sion Flats. Brax­ton is a ruth­less mon­ster that kills at will, with no appar­ent motive or rea­son. The kind that shouldn’t have been born.

Fur­ther­more, he isn’t stu­pid. His IQ is noto­ri­ously sky high. Not only he’s a savvy mas­ter­mind that kills, he’s involved with the traf­fick­ing of guns, drugs and bod­ies. Locals of Mis­sion Flats fear him, enough to turn a blind eye to his crim­i­nal activ­i­ties. Any­one who dares to stand in his way, he’ll take their life. And these locals know it.

The police then explains why they believe Brax­ton respon­si­ble for the Danziger mur­der, Danziger was about to bring in a star wit­ness that could destroy Braxton’s home-grown empire. So the police are going after him—no mat­ter what and how—before he could get to their star witness.

Intrigued, Ben revis­its the mur­der scene at the lake­side cabin. Var­i­ous pat­terns of blood splat­ters on walls. Traces on the floor where Danziger once lay. He couldn’t find any solid clues. Around then, a stranger appears at the cabin. When he sees what Ben had tried to do, he scolds him for con­t­a­m­i­nat­ing vital clues. Chas­tised, Ben demands to know why the stranger was at the cabin. The stranger says he was curi­ous, that’s all. Ben isn’t con­vinced. The stranger patiently explains:

“I told you, I’m a police­man. Well, a retired police­man. But as they say, a retired police­man is like a retired whore — she can stop work­ing but she’ll always be a whore. We’ll always be police­men, you and I. It’s the nature of the job, Ben Truman.”

Ben learns this stranger is John Kelly, a retired Boston police detec­tive, who’s now liv­ing at a cabin nearby. Once Ben’s assured, John is curi­ous to know how could a police chief like Ben lack basic detect­ing skills. Ben explains he’s never had a chance to learn. He hasn’t been in the police force for long. Ver­sailles isn’t exactly a breed­ing ground for seri­ous crimes, any­way. John sym­pa­thet­i­cally takes him through a pace of learn­ing how to read the mur­der scene around the cabin.

Sens­ing he could learn a lot more from John that may help him to be more involved with the Danziger case, Ben talks him into swear­ing in as a junior Ver­sailles police offi­cer to assist him with the Danziger case. They travel to Boston, right up to Mis­sion Flats itself.

The police force accepts him as a guest, so they let him be part of var­i­ous [???] relat­ing to the Danziger case, includ­ing wit­ness­ing a police offi­cer mak­ing a deal with a petty crim­i­nal, watch­ing a drug raid in action, and sit­ting in a court hear­ing. There’s so much to learn. He may be unskilled and out of sorts, but he’s a quick learner.

Aware of this, John Kelly and a cer­tain fel­low detec­tive pro­vide assis­tance by explain­ing some details, tak­ing him to hid­den places in Mis­sion Flats, and intro­duc­ing him to var­i­ous char­ac­ters, rang­ing from offi­cers to crim­i­nals, and some tips and tricks along the way. Ben also meets a num­ber of lawyers includ­ing John Kelly’s own single-mother daugh­ter, whom he grad­u­ally becomes roman­ti­cally involved with.

Ben watches, lis­tens, learns, and res­onates; comes to learn that some mem­bers of the police would do almost any­thing to bring crim­i­nals down. If that means mak­ing an ille­gal move or using a shady method that would ulti­mately pro­tect the inno­cent and the good, so be it. While Ben under­stands the neces­sity of this, he can’t help but spec­u­late whether some may have crossed the line. If they did, how and why?

Any­how, he also even­tu­ally realises the ini­tial por­trait of the ruth­less king Harold Brax­ton may not be accu­rate. In fact, there are some details don’t seem to fit. It feels as if some are forced together, just to bring Brax­ton down. He isn’t sure why, even though Brax­ton clearly isn’t inno­cent. And there are two sep­a­rate killing cases that increas­ingly puz­zle him. Fur­ther he inves­ti­gates, darker and more com­pli­cated his jour­ney becomes. Even more so when he comes face to face with the leg­end him­self: Harold Braxton.

That’s a sum­mary of the first fifty-odd pages of this 500-page story. I should sum­marise the whole story, but I don’t want to because it con­tains quite a few twists and turns. Some sur­prises are pre­dictable, sure, but some aren’t. Actu­ally, I’m hav­ing dif­fi­cul­ties writ­ing this review because Mis­sion Flats is the sort that you should read with­out know­ing what to expect. I hope you’ll for­give me over the vague and patchy nature of this review.

When I realised the open­ing chap­ter was in present tense, I hes­i­tated for a moment because I’m not keen on read­ing sto­ries in present tense. Then I realised Keis­hon knows me well enough to know my likes and dis­likes. I thought if she’d been after me to read Mis­sion Flats for months, I ought to give it a chance, so I did.

As Ben nar­rated some sig­nif­i­cant inci­dents that took place dur­ing the thirty-year span, I was increas­ingly a bit dis­con­certed. The nar­ra­tive style seemed unusual and jolt­ing as it jumped between dif­fer­ent time peri­ods and places. When Chap­ter One appeared, Ben’s nar­ra­tion slipped into a con­ven­tional form of sto­ry­telling, now in past tense. At this point, I admit I was relaxed enough to read on. It was still a hard slog because there was some­thing strange about Ben’s nar­ra­tion, but after some twenty pages, I was a goner. His story had com­pletely sucked me in.

I increas­ingly sym­pa­thised with Ben while he strug­gled to make sense of the world the police and crim­i­nals live in, and all these codes and invis­i­ble rules they live by. He was a decent bloke who was doing as best as he can in this world. Then a sur­prise twist hap­pened. This threw me out of the story. Then another and one more. My sym­pa­thy for Ben less­ened almost each time, even though I still liked and respected him.

Basi­cally, it’s not a sim­ple and straight­for­ward tale of crime. It’s partly a psy­cho­log­i­cal drama, partly a mys­tery and partly a philo­soph­i­cal inquiry. It made me con­sider some cer­tain aspects of crime and morals. Such as what is the def­i­n­i­tion of jus­tice? What is legal and what isn’t? And if it isn’t, is it just if it’s done for the good? It’s this aspect that made Mis­sion Flats so enjoy­able, par­tic­u­larly this even­tual real­i­sa­tion that there is no such thing as moral abso­lutism. I feel the end­ing enforces this.

Mis­sion Flats does have a cou­ple of red her­rings and a few pre­dictable moments, but you sense it’s all part of this grand plan. Espe­cially how it built up the sus­pense around Harold Brax­ton. When Ben met with him, it became appar­ent that it wouldn’t stop there. There would be more to come. Is the con­clu­sion of this grand plan what I expected? Yes and no. It’s the ‘no’ part that makes Mis­sion Flats mem­o­rable, good and bad.

Oh, I’ll be frank: it pissed me off. Big time. IMO, Lan­day broke a golden rule here, but my husband—who also read this—loved it. He felt it paid off well, which didn’t please the unhappy bunny in me. “He broke the rule!” I repeat­edly com­plained. “He broke the damn rule!”

But I have to hand it to Lan­day for tying all loose ends together neatly and so well. It didn’t please me, but it was still impres­sive, any­how. As I’m writ­ing this, it’s occurred to me it’s actu­ally bet­ter than I expected. I’m still a bit upset, though. There is a major con­ti­nu­ity error with a time­line. I checked other reviews online to see if review­ers noticed and none of them did, which made me doubt myself. Then I realised: does the con­ti­nu­ity error affect the story, though? No. If it did, it still doesn’t mat­ter. If you read this story, you’ll know why.

Regard­less of that, I’m giv­ing this book — con­sid­er­ing the moral com­plex­ity of Mis­sion Flats and the fact it’s William Landay’s debut — a B+.