PROTAGONIST: Moe Praeger, PISETTING: Brooklyn, New York - 1978 and 1998SERIES: #1 of 4RATING: 4.0At one time, Moe Prager was an officer with the NYPD, admittedly, not a very good one, although he did love the job. He's been forced to retire due to an injury. Contrary to expectations, he wasn't injured while taking down a big time criminal; rather, he hurt his knee when he slipped on a piece of paper in the squad room. He's had a few operations, but his mobility has been affected and he needs to use a cane. Now, he has to move on with his life; and he's uncertain what direction to take. At the moment, he's decided to go in with his brother, Aaron, and buy a wine shop. But then something happens that takes him in a whole different direction.Francis Maloney is a powerful political figure in the City; and based on a recommendation from Moe's best friend, Rico Tripoli, he hires Moe to look for his missing son, Patrick M. Maloney. Patrick is a college student; his disappearance has been widely reported in the press but has not led to any sightings. In an effort to figure out what happened, Moe interrogates Patrick's fellow students, friends and family. What he learns is rather puzzling. Patrick has had some relationship issues, seemingly obsessed with the idea of impregnating a woman, any woman, to start a family. In addition, while at school, he was observed acting in an obsessive-compulsive fashion. He would spend hours in his room, "walking the perfect square", walking in a pattern and dressing and undressing in a predetermined order, over and over again. He certainly appears to be a very conflicted man and not the college frat boy that one might expect.Moe's investigation uncovers a lot of secrets about Patrick and his father. Sadly, there are elements of greed and betrayal that strongly impact Moe personally as well. The one good thing that comes of all of this is that Moe meets Katy, Patrick's sister, and they fall in love. Most of the book takes place in 1978; however, there are flash forwards to the present day that bring the case to its ultimate resolution. The story is well paced and has its share of surprises along the way, although there were a few scenes where I felt the explicatory revelations were overdone.Moe Prager is a great character. I really appreciated that Coleman did not make him into the stereotypical private investigator. He's not an alcoholic; he has a family that he cares about and is involved with; and he's not necessarily the most competent investigator that ever lived. What he does have is lots of heart and an inquiring mind that doesn't let him settle on anything until he's dug as deep as he can. In direct contrast is Francis Maloney, who is a racist and bigot and arouses every possible negative emotion.Coleman has received numerous awards for the Moe Prager series, which inconceivably went out of print even as his success grew. Thanks to Busted Flush Press who is reissuing the series and making it available to the reading public.
WALKING THE PERFECT SQUARE introduces Moe Prager, a New York City police officer who was forced into early retirement by a bizarre, rather embarrassing accident. The book begins in the present - well, 1998 - when Moe is summoned by a dying man who claims to have knowledge of a case Moe worked right after his forced retirement, a case that still haunts Moe to this day. Then Moe flashes back to the late 70s. As he recovers from his career-ending accident physically, he also needs to figure out how to recover from the emotional loss of a job he loves. However, when a young college student vanishes, Moe is pulled back into the fold in a private capacity. He's investigating the disappearance for the family of the young man. The investigation takes Moe Prager into biker bars, sex clubs and the punk underground. It also takes Moe into the life of the missing man's sister, Katy.WALKING THE PERFECT SQUARE was my first introduction to Reed Farrel Coleman. And wow! What a gift! Coleman told me that he got his start in writing through poetry and I don't think he's stopped writing poetry, he simply disguises it now as prose.Moe isn't an arrogant, cocky, stereotypical P.I. And yet, WALKING THE PERFECT SQUARE does retain many of the traditional characteristics of the P.I. novel.Coleman's intelligent humor is also one of the strengths of this novel. I was regularly having to explain to colleagues why I was laughing out loud during lunch breaks. Coleman puts his gift with the English language to work creating rich, dynamic characters; vivid depictions of New York City and some of it's not-so-glamorous locales; and he builds an incredible crime fiction plot. I loved the way he would subtly introduce nagging little questions about the investigation and then just leave them hanging. If you're being a lazy reader you might forget about them, but you're more likely to wonder about them. And then more come and they start to forge into bigger questions. And Moe's as clueless about these nagging questions as you the reader are, so you're walking through the plot together...clueless. But boy, is it a memorable trip!
Do You like book Walking The Perfect Square (2002)?
I read Gun Church a week ago and had to go out and pick up the first book in the Moe Prager series. I loved GC and I wasn't disappointed with WtPS.Definitely not your typical PI book, I mean, he's not even a PI. Prager is an ex-cop now retired because of a knee injury. Prager gets a call from a hospice nurse saying that a patient wants to see him and only him even though Prager doesn't know the patient. The story then jumps back and forth in time to a period right after his injury when he became involved in a missing persons case. He starts out as a very reluctant participant and doesn't really consider himself a legitimate investigator because in the one case that made his name, he believes he just got lucky.The case involves a college student who basically falls off the grid at a party and his family is still searching for him. Moe is introduced to the father by a former colleague who just so happens to be bucking for a bump in rank. He instantly dislikes the father but is still drawn slowly into the case. He becomes more entangled after he meets the missing students older sister...and well, you need to read the rest yourself.I'm very interested to see where the series goes from here. Many of these PI types are the rough and tumble type and can easily take of themselves. With his bum knee, it's not quite as easy for Prager. I'm always looking for something a little different in the detective or PI genre, because let's face it, there are plenty of these stories out there and frankly many of them are mediocre.
—Ctgt
Reed Farrel Coleman’s “Walking the Perfect Square” is not an easy book to review. It is a good, probably even a very good novel, yet the publisher and the author himself are trying very hard to sell it as a masterpiece. There is a Foreword, where an Edgar Award-winning novelist Megan Abbott compares Mr. Coleman’s opus to that of Raymond Chandler. She detects Chandlerian themes, Chandlerian rhythm, and Chandlerian melancholy in Mr. Coleman’s prose. The author provides a pompous and pretentious Afterword where he explains the “odd confluence of factors” that led to the writing of this novel. Both a foreword and an afterword? I have seen it done only in the case of classics. This novel is quite far from being a classic. It is not even in the same class as Chandler’s “The Long Goodbye”.The beginning of “Walking the Perfect Square” is promising. The prose is lean, mean, and funny. However, with the progress of the plot, the writing deteriorates. Mr. Coleman uses too many words. Where Raymond Chandler or Ross Macdonald needed just a sentence or two to convey a mood, Mr. Coleman needs half a page. On the positive side, the bracketing of the 1978 story by the 1998 events works. The plot is interesting up to a point, but some two-thirds into the novel there is a fissure in its fabric. The Valentine’s Day party at Pooty’s, which plays a crucial role in preparation of the denouement, seems weirdly incongruent with the rest of the book. It might be a problem with the prose, almost like inserting a chapter from Dickens into a postmodern novel. The Epilogue, which precedes the Afterword (I forgot to add that there also is a sort of Prologue after the Foreword) is pretentious. The author explains what has happened to all characters from the novel after the trajectory of the plot ended. Why not leave things to the reader’s imagination? And the Afterword itself - the novel should speak for itself; do we really need the author to explain it?Other than that “Walking the Perfect Square” is a good read. Great title, length below 250 pages, well-drawn characters, clever ending, incisive portrayal of arrogance of powerful people, and other goodies abound.Three and a half stars.
—Lukasz Pruski
Walking the Perfect Square shuttles back and forth between 1978 and 1998, with Moe reflecting back on the case as he waits to meet a dying man who holds the promise of adding the final piece to a puzzle that has shaped the course of his life over the previous twenty years. It’s a plot device that works well; indeed, the plot unfolds and twists cleverly, hooking the reader in early and never letting go. Whilst the writing is quite functional (rather than the poetic prose I was expecting given other reviews), the narrative is nonetheless multi-textured, with excellent characterisation, sparkling dialogue, and a philosophical undertow that pervades the text without explicitly dominating it. In Prager, Coleman has created a character with rare emotional depth; someone whose life seems worth exploring further. Some books are all surface, telling an entertaining story but little more, others demand you reflect on the moral complexities of life. The first kind fizzle for a moment, the second hangs round to haunt you. Walking the Perfect Square is the second kind.
—Rob Kitchin
