William Landay came to the fore with his debut novel Mission Flats.  His second novel The Strangler is a departure from this both in composition and topically.  As much as this is a work of fiction, The Strangler is set in 1963 during the tumultuous period when the United States is still recovering from the assassination of President J F Kennedy.  However, back in Boston in 1962 a venerable Irish-American police officer is shot in an alley while on duty.  The murderer of the officer in question Joe Daley Sr has never been found and his three children, Joe Jr who is also a cop, Ricky an upscale thief and Michael the lawyer are still grieving the loss of their father.  Their mother however on the other hand and much to the dismay of her children has moved on and into the arms of her late husband’s partner Brendan Conroy.

As much as the boys detest Conroy (they hold him responsible for their father’s death), they all have their own issues to contend with.  Joe owes money to the mob and therefore has to do work for Vinny "The Animal" Gargano.  Ricky is trying to avoid being beaten up for stealing some diamonds that belong to a thug that is also being protected while Michael does not believe that Alberto DeSalvo is the Boston Strangler.  When Ricky’s girlfriend is murdered while DeSalvo is locked up the three brother’s band together to investigate the murder.

The three sons alternate as protagonists in this gripping tale, which combines authentic characters with fictional ones.  It is clear that Landay makes good use of his own familiarity as a prosecutor, but the actual tension is in the moral ambiguities that are found within this excellent and gripping novel.  This is surrounded by the larger story of the Strangler.  The inner tale masterfully depicts the insidiousness of greed, even within the Daley family.  Good may prevail, but not always noticeably, and the many twists that take place are genuinely shocking in the hands of this excellent writer.

While Landay has used the Boston Strangler as a reference point to this novel it is in fact a tale, which looks firmly at family, bonds that are linked together by a peculiar form of honour and justice.  The Strangler is an engrossing crime novel that delves into the lives of this close knit but fraught family and how they all join forces during a crisis.  The emphasis is most certainly on the themes of crime and punishment, love, honour truth and justice.  The tale also implies that DeSalvo was not the Strangler, but this is only employed by Mr. Landay in his theory more as an aside in support of his overall theme of unity during a crisis.

The Strangler

Keith Miles 

In 1963, Boston was not a happy place to be. A mob war was raging, a serial killer was spreading terror and President John F.Kennedy, favourite son of Massachusetts, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Of these three events, it was the Boston Strangler who took precedence in the minds of most people and it is on his activities that William Landay focuses his novel. WhIle other writers have taken a sensationalist route with the same subject-matter, he provides a controlled, complex, thoughtful treatment that digs deep into the psyche of the city. 

The three Daley brothers are sons of a Boston cop. Joe, the eldest, has followed his father into the Police Department but his gambling debts pull him down into the city's gangland. Michael is a hot-shot lawyer, assigned to the beleaguered Strangler task force. Unlike his brothers, Ricky operates on the other side of the law as an expert burglar. The lives of all three men are suddenly shattered by appalling challenges and, in the shadow of the Boston Strangler, each has to fight to survive. It's a compelling tale, told with great verve and compassion and it confirms the arrival of a major new talent whose debut novel, Mission Flats, won the CWA John Creasey Memorial Dagger for Best First Novel. If there's a prize for the Best Second Crime Novel, this has to be a contender.