Emerson's "Cape Disappointment": Black loses track of his memory and his wife

Author Earl Emerson's latest book starts with a bang: a firsthand account of a bombing at a political rally in Seattle, recollected from a hospital bed. The badly injured narrator of "Cape Disappointment" (Ballantine, 368 pp., $26), private eye Thomas Black, tells the story as he fights for his life.

The heavily sedated detective does his best to regain clarity as he hallucinates, has fragmented memories, gets poked and prodded by medicos and is visited by a woman he doesn't recognize who claims to be his wife. (The baffled and frustrated Black remarks at one point, "There is a time as you're attempting to wake up when your brain slips cogs.")

The book's author, Earl Emerson, is an assured novelist with, as this new book amply demonstrates, a knack for combining tight plotting with straightforward prose. Many of his most compelling and convincing books involve the world of firefighting. No surprise: In his day job, North Bend resident Emerson is a lieutenant in the Seattle Fire Department.

But now he has returned with his longtime detective hero for the first time in a decade. Black is back!

In many ways, Black is a classic gumshoe. He lives in a dilapidated house in the University District, obeys his own rules and has a penchant for wiseacre comments and bad jokes even when the going is rough. On the other hand, the private eye is no lone wolf — he's blissfully married to his longtime love, attorney Kathy Birchfield.

Slowly, Black begins to piece together the time before the bombing. He remembers that he and his wife had been working on opposite sides of a tight Senate race. Birchfield was working for the liberal incumbent, Jane Sheffield, and passionately believed in Sheffield's agenda.

Meanwhile, Sheffield's opponent, conservative James Maddox, has hired Black. The two men knew each other from their days as cops. Black was never as wedded to his client's platform as his wife was to hers, but he figured Maddox was an OK enough guy.

In time Black returns, more or less, to physical health and is released from the hospital. But then he has to come to terms with an even more devastating tragedy.

He slowly remembers that a light plane recently crashed into the ocean near Cape Disappointment, on Washington's southwest coast. In the plane were Sheffield and members of her staff — including Black's beloved Kathy. It appears that no one survived.

Working through his grief, the P.I. struggles to learn what happened. Lending complexity to the task is Black's conviction that he has seen his wife in a car — well after the crash.

A number of vivid secondary characters add spice to the story. One is a slightly disreputable ex-CIA guy-turned-conspiracy nut, perhaps certifiable, with all kinds of crazy-sounding theories. He tries to convince Black that a high-level cover-up operation is behind Kathy's plane crash.

Black is skeptical at first, but what if the guy is right? After all, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you. Sure enough, the trail leads Black to ... well, I'd have to be certifiable myself (not to mention mean-spirited) to reveal more of this fast-moving and entertaining tale.

Seattle writer Adam Woog's column on mystery and crime fiction appears on the second Sunday of the month in The Seattle Times.