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Winter (Bob & Marcus Mystery 4), by H.N. Hirsch
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By H.N. Hirsch
Published by Pisgah Press, 2025
Five stars
What sets this series apart from, say, the Meg Perry mysteries, is that each installment represents a substantial time jump in the lives of Bob Abramson and Marcus George. Marcus meets Bob in the first book. In this book, Bob is about to turn forty, and Marcus is nearly fifty. Plus, they have an adopted Chinese daughter named Lily. They have been together eighteen years.
Syncing this with my actual life, I am the same age as Marcus, and in the year 2000, in which this is set, we had a five-year-old adopted Chinese daughter. As in the previous books, this is, thus, a “historical” novel, but set in the relatively recent past; a past I lived through and thus have vivid memories of. This is simply to disclose that I do not have a normal editorial detachment in reading these books.
This is particularly relevant in “Winter,” because the central theme of the entire mystery plot is fidelity. The secondary motif is the importance of parents to their children, and the love of children for their parents. Every bit of the emotional punch of this story is drawn from those two themes.
And it’s a bit of a sucker-punch. Love wins, I hasten to say, but not without a fight. Except, of course, for the murder victim.
Once more, Marcus gets himself involved in a murder, quite by accident, and drags Bob into it because he has legal skills. In this one way Marcus is rather like Jamie Brodie in the Meg Perry books—forever stumbling onto corpses and turning his life upside down. But Hirsch’s goal is more about digging into the way people change over time—the way relationships and friendships change over time.
The story is intimate, poignant, and somewhat appalling, depending on your personal viewpoint. Bob and Marcus are the constant that keeps your faith in humanity going.
Bob and Marcus are great characters. They are strong, vulnerable men, successful and yet constantly unsure of themselves in the face of the remarkable human nastiness they see around them. As in all the books, Marcus’s family is barely mentions, while Bob’s family is truly THEIR family.