A Week Away (Dom Reilly #4) by Marshall Thornton

[Ulysses]

A Week Away (A Dom Reilly Mystery, book 4)
By Marshall Thornton
Published by Kenmore Books, 2025
Five stars

All through this book—which I read in less than a day (I am retired)—I kept chuckling at the author’s dark, wry humor. The persona of Dominick Reilly is, for me, endearing, but not frustrating (as was Nick Nowack in the Boys Town series). Dom has become a gentle man, with a strong outer layer of positivity protecting his ambivalent inner good man. He just wants to be happy, at last, and work to help people. He loves Ronnie, his real-estate hotshot boyfriend. He loves their life.

So, you know it’s not going to be easy.

The premise of this book is hilarious and horrific. At Dom and Ronnie’s housewarming party for their new co-op in Long Beach, a teenaged boy nobody seems to know appears. He says his name is Cass, and that Dom is his father. With vague threats that Dom isn’t sure Cass can carry out, the man and the boy take off on a mad quest to find out what happened to Cass’s real father, and in doing so they open a can of very nasty worms that threatens everything Dom has worked so hard to obtain.

More importantly, the teenager’s obsession might just destroy his life. Dom wants Cass off his back; but he also wants to save the boy.

The characters Dom and Cass meet along the way are often memorable, and mostly appalling. Dom gets a too-close look into the world Cass grew up in, which offers up unpleasant echoes of the life he left behind. Cass is looking for a father, and on top of that he gets a top-notch detective who reluctantly goes with the flow and, by the heart-stopping finale of the book, has become the kind of man we all know Dom Reilly is: a flawed superhero who’s fast on his feet and deeply familiar with the nuances of the law and moral necessity.

The think about this story is that I now can’t imagine what could possibly come next.