My Darling Detective, Howard Norman
My Darling Detective, Howard Norman
List: $19.95 | Sale: $13.97
Club: $9.97

My Darling Detective

Author: Howard Norman

Narrator: Bronson Pinchot

Unabridged: 7 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 03/28/2017

Synopsis

Jacob Rigolet—a soon-to-be former assistant to a wealthy art collector—looks up from his seat at an auction to see his mother, the former head librarian at the Halifax Free Library, walking almost casually up the aisle. Before a stunned audience, she flings an open jar of black ink at master photographer Robert Capa’s Death on a Leipzig Balcony. What’s more, Jacob’s police detective fiancée, Martha Crauchet, is assigned to the ensuing interrogation.In My Darling Detective, Howard Norman delivers a fond nod to classic noir, as Jacob’s understanding of the man he has always assumed to be his father unravels against the darker truth of Robert Emil, a Halifax police officer suspected but never convicted of murdering two Jewish residents during the shocking upswing of anti-Semitism in 1945. The denouement, involving a dire shootout and an emergency delivery—the second Rigolet to be born in the Halifax Free Library—is Norman at his provocative, uncannily moving best.

About Howard Norman

Howard Norman is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His novels The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist were nominated for the National Book Award. His books have been translated into twelve languages. He divides his time between East Calais, Vermont, and Washington, DC.

About Bronson Pinchot

Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Betsy on July 19, 2019

I've had a sinus infection for almost two weeks, so I wanted an entertaining book to make me forget about the clog. Howard Norman's My Darling Detective, recommended by GR friends Paul Secor and Mary Lins, was listed as shelved in the mystery section of my local NY Public Library branch, so I highta......more

Goodreads review by Paul on May 12, 2025

Coincidence - The narrator of this novel mentions at one point that he had worked at John W. Doull, Bookseller. When my wife and I were on vacation some time ago, we were in Halifax, Nova Scotia for a day and spent an afternoon looking in bookstores. I'm sure that I found and bought an inscribed cop......more

Goodreads review by switterbug (Betsey) on February 23, 2017

This is my first Howard Norman, so I don’t have his oeuvre to compare this to. But if he consistently writes this well, I’ll be a frequent flyer. MY DARLING DETECTIVE is a genre-crossing novel that combines detective, mystery, literature, domestic dramady, and historical fiction into one delightful,......more

Goodreads review by Adam on September 06, 2022

The NYT review called it a light fiction, in Graham Greene's sense, and it's the best kind: where the author isn't too worried about plot or character, but mostly just wants to share a personality and show you all the neat stuff he loves. Kind of like late period Kim Stanley Robinson, in that sense.......more

Goodreads review by Mary on May 10, 2017

What a delight! Howard Norman's, "My Darling Detective", is a thoroughly entertaining bit of modern detective noir. Set in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in the late 1970s, Jake Rigolet's former librarian mother, Nora, has just defaced a 1945 photograph as it's being put up for auction. Jake's fiance, Martha......more

Quotes

“Norman knows how to weave an enticing and satisfying mystery, one tantalizing thread at a time.” New York Times Book Review

“The whimsy is balanced by moments of powerfully evoked realism.” Washington Post

“Pinchot is an actor capable of the subtlety this type of stylized fiction demands. His excellent portrayals of the hopelessly in love Jacob and Martha, to the wistful Nora, and the hard-boiled characters on the couple’s favorite radio show, Detective Levy Detects, don’t miss a beat.” Publishers Weekly (audio review)

“You’d think that in an audiobook billed as an homage to noir fiction, narrator Bronson Pinchot would opt for a dark, suspicious interpretation. He does none of that—but he doesn’t have to. His reading is nuanced and full of twists and turns, but with a brightness and richness not usually associated with the genre. Pinchot is clearly having fun using his deep, deliberate voice for the narrative and a collection of vivid character voices for the dialogue. He also knows how to pronounce French names, sometimes with a verbal wink, and how to pace the story so that it remains both engaging and mysterious. The result is a wonderful audio experience.” AudioFile

“Jacob and Martha are delightful characters, young lovers unraveling a complex and very personal mystery. This is a crowd-pleasing old-school mystery novel.” Publishers Weekly

“Norman pulls off what old-school noir pros like Chandler and Goodis did…An unconventional, lively literary mystery.” Kirkus Reviews

“An homage to noir and so much more.” Library Journal

“An emotionally vibrant, keenly funny, genuinely suspenseful, and altogether spellbinding novel.” Booklist

Awards

  • LitHub Pick
  • NPR Pick
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