COLLIN WILCOX - THE LONELY HUNTER

Synopsis/blurb..............

In the underworld of San Francisco, a broken cop searches for his daughter

Seven years ago, Frank Hastings quit on his family. After a half-baked pro football career, he had fallen in love with the bottle and needed to go west. In San Francisco, he got sober, and now he’s one of the toughest police officers around, in a city whose counterculture does not make life easy for the men in blue. San Francisco in 1969 is an ugly place, torn apart by drugs and crime and indifference—and it’s about to destroy Hastings’s daughter.

Claudia comes to town following a boy, a hippie kid who has filled her head with dreams of psychedelic happiness in Haight-Ashbury—and she quickly vanishes into the district’s rainbow-colored underbelly. To find the daughter he abandoned, Hastings will push himself closer to the edge than he has in years. His first lead is a gruesome one—a young male flower child slaughtered in the Haight—but the bloody trail may lead to Claudia.

Until earlier this year, I was unaware of Sergeant Frank Hastings of the San Francisco Police Department and his creator, author Collin Wilcox. Wilcox penned 19 Frank Hastings books in total between 1969 and 1992, before his death in 1996. Hastings collaborated with Bill Pronzini on the book Twospot which features Hastings and Pronzini’s own PI – Nameless. This collaboration was an enjoyable book for me when I read it earlier this year.

The Lonely Hunter is the first in the series with Frank and as a short police procedural it was interesting enough without ever catching fire.  We discover a bit about Hastings’ back story as he goes about his work; his marital disintegration, the abandonment of his children, his issues with drink and his subsequent return to sobriety and his re-incarnation from pro-footballer to fully functioning police detective.  We view the world through his eyes and we get an understanding of his frustrations with his colleagues and their deficiencies as well as his own failings as a father and husband.

Pretty much what you would expect in a novel set in the late 60’s in San Francisco ........hippies, drugs, sex, long hair, youthful idealism, mystics, gurus and dodgy fashions. Introduce a few murders and the police; a straightforward investigation where you ask questions of enough people and eventually the answers, the lies and the evasions allow you to join the dots up and point you in the direction of your culprit.

Despite the build-up describing Hastings and the search for his missing daughter, this aspect of the book seemed more of a back-story than the raison d’être for the book. Diverting enough, but the crimes Frank investigated didn’t particularly concern his daughter, though some of the people we crossed paths with knew both. 

Interesting enough, but I’m not yet sold on the series. I think I would need to read the 2^nd in the series before deciding whether I would like to read further on.

Mysterious Press/Open Road Media have made the series available as e-books, as well as offering other non-Hastings Wilcox books.

3 from 5  

I  accessed this one through Net Galley.