Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes, by Blair S. Walker. Ballantine. 225 pages. $22.95.
Blair S. Walker, reared in Baltimore, has worked for The Sun and other newspapers. When he decided to write mystery novels, Walker created Baltimore newspaper reporter Darryl Billups, who, not so incidentally, is African-American like his creator.
Don't Believe Your Lying Eyes, the third Billups novel, is filled with Baltimore scenes, insights into journalism, social commentary on race and other vital matters -- not to mention a captivating plot.
The city scenes, journalism tutorials, social commentary and riffs on race are so interesting that the plotting might not matter for Baltimore readers.
Still, this is a mystery novel, so a review ought to discuss the storyline at least briefly.
For 17 years, payments have arrived on time to a storage facility in West Baltimore. Unit 25 is filled with material possessions. It is not entirely clear why the possessions are there or who is paying the bills regularly.
But such details are not the concern of the storage facility management as long as the payments arrive. Unexpectedly, the payments cease. Management, under law, is allowed to sell the right to the unit's material goods to the highest bidder.
As that high bidder examines the contents of the unit, she stumbles upon the corpse of an African-American female who, forensic examination shows, is a murder victim. As Baltimore law enforcement officers sift for clues at unit 25, shots ring out. A storage facility employee and the high bidder are killed. Two Baltimore homicide detectives are wounded. One of the shooters is dead, too -- a 16-year-old male with no history of violent crime.
What is going on? How to connect all those dots? This is a big story for Billups, ace reporter at the Baltimore Herald. As he works the story, he becomes acquainted with one of the wounded homicide detectives, Thelma Holmes, while his relationship with a live-in lover is falling apart.
Walker lets on early in the book who killed the woman in unit 25 -- a high-ranking African-American Baltimore City official and his ne'er-do-well brother. The question for readers to answer is not who, but why.
The why eventually becomes clear as part of an extended violent ending featuring the nearly incomprehensible bravery of Holmes and Billups.
To some extent, the novel is a police procedural; Walker obviously understands law enforcement. To a larger extent, it is a journalism procedural; Walker demonstrates how unrelenting curiosity, skillful interviewing techniques, wise use of documents and common sense make for great reporting. He demonstrates that there are lucky reporters, but no lazy lucky reporters.
As remarkable as Walker's journalism procedural are his candid passages about race. The strengths and foibles of African-Americans and Caucasians alike, with their "own kind" and across the racial divide, are portrayed by Walker in passage after passage. Promoting racial understanding might, or might not, be part of Walker's mission as a novelist. Whatever his mission, better understanding of the ways race plays out in contemporary society ought to result.
Because this novel is so intriguing on so many levels, I plan to read its predecessors, Up Jumped the Devil and Hidden in Plain View. I also plan to stay alert for any future novels from Walker.
Steve Weinberg started his newspaper reporting career during 1970 in East St. Louis, Ill., a city poisoned by racial hatred, and has been learning about race in U.S. society ever since. One of his avocations is collecting novels with journalists as protagonists. The collection, numbering more than 3,000 books, is available to the public at the University of Missouri library in Columbia, Mo., where Weinberg lives.