A Fearsome Moonlight Black reads like a memoir. At the end of the book, in the author’s notes, Putnam states, essentially, that the novel is a memoir based on his early years as a policeman with an added fictional love interest, so this qualifies as “autofiction,” which combines two seemingly-inconsistent narrative forms, fiction and autobiography. Author Putnam does a good job getting into the mindset of a 21-year-old rookie cop working the beat in a small Southern California town. As the protagonist, David Becket, ages, the reader sees the effects his career has on him and his family, but there’s little show of emotional growth over time. After over-reaching his job description for the umpteenth time, he’s assigned to track down cold cases and thus becomes a “bone detective.” Putnam puts in plenty of twist and turns, at least one of which I didn’t catch until the bitter end. That said, the protagonist wasn’t particularly well-nuanced and the prose a bit simplistic for my tastes. The “ah-ha” moment I expect in a good memoir was also missing—that point that demonstrates how the author’s life differs from the lives of others in the same predicament, that point where he shows what he’s learned. There’s a lot of physical action but little emotional process here.
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A Fearsome Moonlight Black (Level Best Books, October 18, 2022) is available as an ebook only through Amazon.
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