A Common Ordinary Murder

Strong, clear prose lifts Pfarrer’s intelligent if at times slow and uneventful novel, set in an unnamed Midwestern city. Steven McCord, an extremely able 42-year-old police lieutenant, is taking law classes as he considers a career change. He’s also tempted to betray his saintly wife, Nora, and begins to visit the apartment of a lovely nurse 10 years younger than he. Meanwhile, an elderly lawyer, Charles Carden, has been murdered, and his visiting daughter, Marie, has disappeared. Carden, who coincidentally was an acquaintance of Nora’s, kept a journal filled with philosophical musings over which McCord ponders. Once Marie’s brutalized body turns up, McCord is haunted by her image and grows increasingly, inexplicably, obsessed with finding her killers. Admirers of Pfarrer’s The Fearless Man and other earlier works will find much to like, but readers used to faster-paced crime fiction may grow impatient with the angst-filled McCord. (Aug.)