Premium Life by Thomas K. Matthews

Premium Life is another excellent crime novel by Thomas K. Matthews, but you’ll have to wait a little while to get your hands on this one. The author forwarded this book to me in a rough and relative unedited form, so the story is still in pre-publication format. Collectively, you can eat your hearts out that I’ve gotten first dibs on this one. I’ve already read two of Matthews’ books, and this one clearly lives up to the standards that led to my highly favorable reviews.

The author’s intent in this one is to introduce a new detective character for what I hope is the beginning of a long series of stories. We’ve seen other authors create such men who are talented detectives but who must live with great flaws. Matthews has created Robert Jacobi, a police detective who cannot walk away from a case once he’s involved, no matter what. But, Jacobi has a different backstory, and his handicaps are both physical and emotional. After generations of Jacobi cops in San Francisco, this very large and scary looking Jacobi was injured on the job. He was in the midst of rescuing the teenage daughter of a city council member when the girl’s abductor pulled the trigger on his shotgun, thereby vaporizing Jacobi’s left hand. He replaced it with a hook, which certainly adds to the formidable image that Matthews invented. While Jacobi remained an able bodied guy, without a left hand, he no longer could be a cop. After retirement, a year of drowning himself in booze, and a divorce, he got sober and reluctantly accepted a job as a life insurance fraud investigator.

In his new role, Jacobi is assigned to take a cursory look at a $500,000 claim in which a man was apparently murdered, but no body was ever found. The insurance policy was new and would be voided if death was due to suicide, and the claimant, David Franklin, was in serious debt, had a family to support, and was dying of pancreatic cancer. For a crime novel, that’s enough of a teaser except to say that the characters are interesting, believable, and well-developed, and the plot lines are riveting. My only frustration with the novel was that I started it when I had too much real work to do, so I couldn’t just finish the novel in one sitting. Don’t you hate it when life intrudes on fantasy? This book gets my strong recommendation, so just be patient until it hits the shelves.