The Hunt Club
John Lescroart
Signet
U.S. paperback reprint
ISBN 0451220102
544 pages; $9.99

John Lescroart starts a new series with The Hunt Club, set in the same universe – even the same San Francisco, and around same police department – as his Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitsky books. While it is written with competence, The Hunt Club is disappointing. It lacks Lescroart’s usual tension, despite a possible kidnap victim for whom the clock is ticking down. It almost seems as if Lescroart is getting bored with his own writing.

The hero of The Hunt Club is Wyatt Hunt, a San Francisco private investigator. The book traces his career from his work with Child Protective Services – some of the more harrowing and interesting scenes in the book concern this work, but they’re nothing but preface – to his decision to hang out his own shingle. With his connections to Dismas Hardy and his law firm, the PI venture is a success from the very beginning. It doesn’t hurt that Hunt has a strong connection to the police department in the person of Devin Juhle, a homicide inspector.

The real plot of the book starts about 50 pages in, when a federal judge is found shot dead in his home study – along with his young and beautiful lover. Shortly thereafter, Andrea Parisi, a gorgeous attorney who has been reporting on a local trial for Trial TV disappears. The police start to wonder if Parisi, who has just become a strong romantic interest for Hunt, wasn’t the one who killed the judge and his lover. Motive? She was the judge’s mistress before the dead woman was.

But there are plenty of other suspects, from the judge’s wife (who had been unaware of his infidelities) to the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, a union of prison guards (over which the judge had been about to exert federal control due to a variety of abuses, from the mundane financial scams to hideous, torturous treatment of prisoners). The story of the CCPOA could have been very interesting indeed, had Lescroart chosen to develop it; but he does not.

And this is true of much of the book: interesting subplots seem about to erupt, but then bubble down again. Not only the CCPOA itself seems like an interesting story, but so does the lawyer who is conflicted about representing the CCPOA, to the tune of millions of dollars in billable work each year. The involvement of Trial TV seems interesting, but is merely a sidebar. There are many ideas here, and many books that could have been written really exploring some of them. But instead, The Hunt Club soon devolves into an almost dead case, with the police suspecting that Parisi did it and then jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, while Hunt refuses to believe it and keeps looking. Even this doesn’t sound like it should be boring; a race against time to find a possible victim of kidnapping should be edge-of-the-seat stuff. But Lescroart loses his way with pages of introspection from one character, agonizing by another character, and the ambitions of a third. By page 400 one is longing for the finish, but that’s still far, far away.

To read some prime Lescroart, try The First Law. That’s a good one. This one isn’t.