(Pinx Video Mysteries Book 1)

By Marshall Thornton

I have been hesitating over this review for a while because Thornton writes predominately gay mystery/romances, which is definitely a niche market and not for every reader. The Pinx Video Mystery series is written for a wider audience, though, and is just so good that I have to recommend it. The first book of the series, Night Drop, begins on the night that officers that beat Rodney King were acquitted and riots broke out across LA.

The riots are only tangentially related to the plot, and the characters themselves are only vaguely curious. At first, this complacency was off-putting, but I remembered having the same sense of distance myself. As much as they seem so recent to me, the 90s were a very different time, with the racism and brutality of police and greater society only starting to become clear to wider population.

On the one hand, I wish this book had given it a little more respect, especially considering how often we are now reliving this on a daily basis, but on the other hand, Thornton really does a masterful job of capturing the (white, middle class) cultural feeling of the 90s. It is very strange to read a well-done period-piece mystery set during your lifetime.

Our protagonist Noah Valentine (other than his name, he is the quintessential everyman) has isolated himself after the death of his partner, spending his day working in the titular Pinx Video store, which he owns, and holing up in his tiny apartment in the evenings, only socializing with his neighbors, a delightful, somewhat older gay couple that are trying to take him under their wing.

The riots only vaguely break through his apathy, and only to the extent that they affect him. He reluctantly closes his video store for the day, and learns on the following day that the camera shop down the street had gotten burned down. He had a casual acquaintance-ship with the owner, and half-assedly tries to find out what happened out of a hazy sense of social duty and curiosity.

As they run across clues that don’t seem to add up, Valentine, his neighbors, and his neighbors’ friends become more drawn into the mystery, as well as the official police investigation. Of course, the official police investigation includes a handsome officer who may or may not have more than official interest in Valentine, but all three books in the series stay in solid PG territory.

Thematically, the book has an odd but very readable overlap of noir and cozy mystery genres. It is packed with amusingly odd characters, all of whom tend to shrug off the crimes around them in a sort of noir-ish existential malaise. I very much hope that this is an ongoing series, but book 3, which came out at the end of last year, had a somewhat more final sense of conclusion than the others.

P.S. – It wasn’t until I was telling Rebecca that all the books have titles relating to video rentals, that I realized that a video rental store might be the most 90s setting possible.