Skip to main content

The Evil Men Do

Review

The Evil Men Do

I have been looking forward to the return of P.T. Marsh since I read the last sentence of the last page of THE GOOD DETECTIVE, John McMahon’s debut novel that introduced Marsh to the world of crime fiction. A homicide detective with the Mason Falls, Georgia police department, Marsh is a tragic figure who is still emotionally reeling from the loss of his wife and son in a hit-and-run incident. THE EVIL MEN DO answers some questions regarding what occurred on that fateful night when Marsh lost everything while raising others in the manner of the best genre fiction.

The book begins with a wellness check that quickly escalates into a homicide investigation. Ennis Fultz is a local real estate impresario. He has a few friends and many enemies as a result of his almost uncanny ability to pocket a wide range of arcane information and utilize it at an opportune time several months or years down the road. One of those few friends happens to be the mayor and the acting chief of police in Mason Falls. When Fultz fails to show up or otherwise check in at the weekly card game he normally has with those individuals, Marsh and his law enforcement partner, Remy Morgan, are dispatched to Fultz’s home to see what’s what. The “what,” of course, is his body. It is determined in short order that Fultz is a murder victim.

"THE EVIL MEN DO meets and exceeds the promise of THE GOOD DETECTIVE, establishing that the superior plotting and writing chops McMahon exhibited in his debut outing were no fluke."

Marsh and Morgan do not lack for suspects. They include the ex-wife of the deceased, a number of very unhappy individuals with whom he had transacted business, and a mysterious woman who was recorded as being in the area of his home at the approximate time of his death. Marsh and Morgan spend a good deal of the story acquiring and eliminating suspects. Marsh, however, is on a slow but steady professional and personal downward spiral due to his familial tragedies, as well as a prior on-duty incident that resulted in the death of a criminal.

When someone else near to him is seriously injured and hovers near death, Marsh pulls out all the stops and finds that there is a potential connection between a current investigation and the deaths of his family members. He crosses a couple of lines and finds himself going rogue as a result. He appears almost certain to lose his home and his job, with seemingly no way out. Among his few remaining assets are his tenacity and the loyalty of his friends. But even those may not be enough.

Meanwhile, a series of short connective vignettes presenting a young girl in successive dangers --- all of them seemingly unconnected to the main plot --- are interspersed throughout the narrative until they ultimately link up with what has been occurring in the primary narrative in a surprising manner.

THE EVIL MEN DO meets and exceeds the promise of THE GOOD DETECTIVE, establishing that the superior plotting and writing chops McMahon exhibited in his debut outing were no fluke. He assures readers in his Acknowledgements that Marsh will return. While this book is complete in itself, there are enough unanswered questions left hanging to provide more than enough fodder for another installment of this highly readable and enjoyable series.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub on March 6, 2020

The Evil Men Do
by John McMahon

  • Publication Date: March 3, 2020
  • Genres: Fiction, Suspense, Thriller
  • Hardcover: 368 pages
  • Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
  • ISBN-10: 052553556X
  • ISBN-13: 9780525535560