The Fairfax Incident by Terrence McCauley is Noir fiction at its finest. The hero is no choir boy and was saved after his fall from grace by a wealthy benefactor. Now investigating the suicide or not of the deceased spouse of a wealthy widow has Charlie uncovering the worst kind of bad guys of the time period and …. This is one you need to read. 5-star offering.

The Fairfax Incident is the first book I have read by Terrence McCauley. It will not be my last. It is a perfect summer read. Set in the Depression, we are introduced to a private detective, Charlie Doherty, who has a benefactor,, Harriman Van Dorn. Charlie is a retired NYPD detective who got in a bit of trouble and a WW I veteran who sometimes has flashbacks. VanDorn asks Charlie to look into the suicide of wealthy Walter Fairfax who appears to have shot himself. Mrs. Fairfax is convinced that Walter did not kill himself. It looks like an easy case for Charlie. Lots of twists and turns involved in the background of prohibition, a German mistress............I thoroughly enjoyed this entertaining book and look forward to a sequel with Charlie.

This book was a page turner, kept me hooked to its story all the way through.

The ex-cop and a private detective, Charlie Doherty was hired by a widow of a wealthy guy who died by suicide. Is it really a suicide or a murder? As he investigates, he starts to discover a bigger picture behind it.

As the story goes, this book gets more and more intriguing. It’s not simply investigating the cause of death of a man, it’s much more larger, interesting and unexpected.

I need to read what's coming next on its sequel.

A well-paced, tightly-written detective story set in 1930s New York, "The Fairfax Incident" centers on Charlie Doherty, a cop turned private investigator whose inquiry into a wealthy man's suicide reveals a dangerous web of deception and intrigue. Terrence McCauley captures the color and detail of his Depression-era setting without sacrificing plot, and his cast of characters contains a satisfying mix of genre standbys: deceptive women, corrupt cops, and an engaging, acerbic narrator.

When Hitler rose to power in the early 1930’s on a tide of nationalism, fascist groups emerged in many countries including the United States. With the economy in shreds, unemployment at an all time high and prohibition, little attention was paid.  It is not surprising that The Fairfax Incident pits Doherty and his allies against one such group.


The Fairfax Incident begins much like any other pulp detective novel, but it quickly metamorphosizes into something more. While it can’t strictly be considered a spy novel, espionage plays a major role in The Fairfax Incident and is likely to play a larger role in the novels that follow. (The end of The Fairfax Incident makes further novels extremely likely) As in many pulp detective novels, there is a hefty dose of action- chases, gunfights, etc.  But there is also a strong human element. Charlie Doherty is tough but he is also compassionate as well as loyal. Terrence McCauley does an excellent job depicting the time period and balancing the human and action elements. My only complaint is that the main villains of the piece were two dimensional. They were stereotypes rather than characters and some of their actions had little motive other than to further the plot. There are holes in the plot, but they aren’t visible as long as you focus on the action and don’t think too much.


Charlie Doherty was kicked off the force in the aftermath of the Grand Central Massacre, but he’s fallen on his feet - working as a private detective for wealthy Manhattanites.  Mrs. Fairfax is convinced that her husband was murdered, despite evidence that he shot himself. Charlie’s benefactor wants him to take the case,so he reluctantly agrees to look into matters.  It swiftly becomes clear that Walter Fairfax’s life was anything but simple. Not only was he enamoured with a beautiful but penniless aristocrat, but he had become closely tied to her friends and their cause - friends who do not wish the nature of their connection to Fairfax known.  The more Charlie digs into what made Fairfax pull the trigger, the more people try to kill him...and the more he realizes that Fairfax’s death is only the beginning.


The Fairfax Incident is an exciting novel that will appeal to a broad audience.  McCauley’s novel isn’t perfect, but it shows potential. While The Fairfax Incident is a stand alone, the novel prepares readers for an ongoing series.


4 / 5


I received a copy of The Fairfax Incident from the publisher and Netgalley.com in exchange for an honest review.


— Crittermom

I enjoyed this book. The main character is Charlie Doherty, who was formerly one of New York's finest and is now a private detective. The story has the feel and descriptive powers of a fine detective yarn. The plot twists and turns as the hero discovers one clue after another to the mystery he is trying to solve amid corruption and lies in New York City in the late 1920s. I liked the author and his word play as much as I liked the characters. I will read more of this author.

The Fairfax Incident is my fourth novel by Terrence McCauley, so you know I’m a fan, but this one was a departure from his prior work. It’s a historical murder mystery that takes place in 1933 New York City. Charlie Doherty was a disgraced detective who had previously been a bag guy for the very corrupt Chief of Police Andrew Carmichael. But, Doherty was rescued by Mr. Harriman Van Dorn, a wealthy and well-connected-to-Washington guy. Van Dorn created a life for Doherty in a fancy NYC pad, and he was asked to purse an investigation of the apparent suicide of Walter Fairfax at the behest of Fairfax’s wife who knew her husband would never have killed himself. She said, “Not that he wasn’t a coward, mind you, but Walter Fairfax was most certainly a cowardly man. He simply wasn’t considerate enough to kill himself. For had he been a considerate man, he would have done us the favor of ending his won life long ago, freeing the children and me from decades of mediocrity and mendacity.” What a great line, and it’s typical of McCauley’s writing.

The story takes the reader through a tour of depression-era New York, the mafia influences that gripped the city, as well as the corrupt police department. This is an excellent and well-told murder mystery and the historical angle is spell-binding. The plot development was great and I did not see the final twist coming until the very end. McCauley’s character development was perfect. Good stuff – it gets my enthusiastic recommendation.

Charlie Doherty, private investigator, “crooked” ex-NYPD detective, ex-Marine, thinks he has it easy. Since his “retirement” from the police force, he has been investigating cases for wealthy clients and being paid handsomely. Cases are funneled to him by the mysterious Harriman Van Dorn—easy cases such as tracking down wayward offspring or tailing spouses in divorce cases. Easy, that is, until he takes on the case of a society matron wanting to know why her husband was murdered. Although the police had ruled Walter Fairfax’s death an open-and-shut case of suicide, his wife thinks otherwise, “Walter was incapable of suicide. Not that he wasn’t a coward, mind you, for Walter Fairfax was most certainly a cowardly man. He simply wasn’t considerate enough to kill himself.” He was too busy making sure his insurance company remained a successful venture even throughout the Depression, during which time this story takes place. Mrs. Fairfax is adamant that someone drove her husband to his death, “The lives and fortunes of insurance men are based on calculations and charts and payment schedules that were created on the off chance that something terrible might happen to a policy holder one day. Do you know that they even have charts that can determine how long a policy holder will live based on certain factors? What’s even more troubling is how accurate the charts are…And that is why, Mr. Doherty, I know my husband did not take his own life.”

So, heaving an inward sigh, Charlie takes the case, thinking it will be a no-brainer to just read the police reports again, talk to a few of Mr. Fairfax’s associates, do some research on Walter Fairfax at the library, wrap up the case quickly and collect another handsome fee. So much for a quick resolution when he gets shot at while walking from the posh apartment of Mrs. Fairfax downtown to the New York Public Library.
The story escalates with the death of someone close to Mr. and Mrs. Fairfax who had information that is helpful to Doherty’s case, Doherty’s catching a beautiful female spy and his realizing that his former cohorts at the police department want to throw a billy club into his investigation.

Although this story is well-paced overall, it gets off to a very slow start, “I stifled a yawn as I listened to the old lady repeat herself for the third time. Or maybe it was the fourth. I’d lost count by then.” I almost did, too—yawn and lose count.

Slang phrases from the 1930s— “the old lady,” “Hooverville,” “Kraut” and calling various places around town a “dump”—are scattered through the first half of the novel to add verisimilitude, but really don’t add much to the story.

Some of the characterization is stereotypical, such as Charlie Doherty and Andrew Carmichael being crooked Irish New York City policemen on the take as part of the Tammany Hall political machine. Mary Pat Dennehy, the library assistant who locates information for Doherty is a “shy, heavy girl with bad skin and thick glasses” who writes fan mail to Doherty during one of his previous cases. “Girls like Mary Pat were a dime a dozen in this town,” but Doherty feels sorry for her because she’s “a sweet kid.”

Yet other characters are more interesting, such as Father Mullins and Harriman Van Dorn. Mysterious Father Mullins knows about guns, foreign languages, mystic runes, and Nazis. Although Van Dorn is very elusive during the first part of the novel (shades of Mission Impossible— “your mission, should you choose to accept it…”), later he is depicted as a loving family man and unofficial government operative.
But, I do like Charlie Doherty’s first-person narration of this case with his smart-mouth responses to his former NYPD colleagues.

All told, this is a nice, fast-paced look into pre-World War II intrigue.

Immersive, smooth noir
A real classic of post WWI NYC in 1930s
Great Private Investigator and a sharp-dressed man

It's 1933 and Charlie Doherty has been kicked off the police force and works as a private detective supported by a very wealthy Mr Van Dorn. When he is paid to investigate the death of a Mr Fairfax, presumed a suicide, he has no idea how big the problem will become.
An entertaining and interesting mystery which moves toward becoming an espionage thriller.

The title sounds like an X-Files episode, doesn’t it? Instead this is a ‘golden age’ gumshoe story. It kicks off as a private investigation into the apparent suicide of a wealthy businessman – but soon it’s obvious that there’s a lot more going on than a bit of slap and tickle on the side…

New York gumshoe Charlie Doherty is doing pretty well for himself, considering it’s 1933 and most working joes are suffering the worst effects of the Depression and Prohibition. Charlie has a powerful benefactor among America’s elite class of high-rollers – which is just as well. While he was a detective on the NYPD, Charlie did some pretty questionable things at the behest of the corrupt commissioner, and he left under some seriously dark clouds.

Charlie barely has a chance to start asking questions about the dead man’s mistress before he’s the target of an Al Capone-style drive-by shooting. The next thing you know, he’s getting his chops slapped by beautiful women and broken-nosed coppers alike, and then suddenly people start talking German and the plot seriously thickens.

It’s pretty obvious, given the date when this story is set, what direction the narrative is going to take – but that didn’t make it any the less enjoyable. Author McCauley creates a credible representation of pre-war East Coast America, and you can almost smell the soup kitchens and cigars in his version of New York.

There’s a tip of the hat to just about every convention in the Big Boy’s Book Of Private Detection. Even so, it was refreshing to read a murder-mystery in which the hero isn’t a drug addict or an alcoholic or an amnesiac or anything weird. Instead he’s a smart guy handing a pretty slick job. The dialogue is slick, the pace clips along without getting bogged down in unnecessary background (or too much attention to irrelevant detail), and one mystery is satisfactorily solved… although author McCauley leaves a big can of worms wriggling for the next episode.

Nothing especially gruelling here; the violence and language aren’t explicit or offensive. A professionally polished package, in fact, which made for an entertaining afternoon.

7/10

My favorite mystery sub-genre is historical mystery, but I haven't had a chance to review any historical crime novel since February when I posted a review of one on Flying High Reviews here . Now that I think about it, the portrait of law enforcement corruption in 19th century San Francisco provided in Chinawoman's Chance by James Musgrave, isn't very different from the situation in New York in the early 1930's that I recently saw in The Fairfax Incident by Terrence McCauley. Yet I do need to make a distinction between the harsh lives of 19th century Chinese immigrants described in Musgrave's book, and the glittering privileged lives of the German aristocratic immigrants depicted in McCauley's mystery.

I was asked to review The Fairfax Incident by publicist Wiley Saichek and was provided with a review copy from the publisher via Net Galley.

The PI protagonist Charlie Doherty was very much a part of NYC corruption when he worked for the police. Mention is made of Teddy Roosevelt's crusade against police corruption in The Fairfax Incident.

This gives me a wonderful pretext for a historical digression. I remembered that Teddy Roosevelt had been a New York Police Commissioner, but it had been many years since I took a class in New York state history as an undergraduate history major. So I did a search for more information and found a review of a book on the subject called Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt's Doomed Quest To Clean Up Sin Loving New York by Richard Zacks. It was reviewed by Krystal Thomas on the blog of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University here . Although Roosevelt had been a failure, he made a reputation for himself as a reform minded Republican. Those who like to remind us that the Republican Party had once been very different tend to use Abraham Lincoln as their example. My favorite example is Teddy Roosevelt who ran for U.S. President as both a Republican and a Progressive.

Back to Charlie Doherty--He is no paragon of virtue, but he is sympathetic. His wealthy patron, Van Dorn, who pays all his expenses and brings him clients, considers Doherty a hero because he rescued Van Dorn's son from a kidnapper. Others might consider him a hero because he fought in WWI as a Marine. Readers who are fans of the Maisie Dobbs mystery series are familiar with the problem of PTSD resulting from combat in WWI. Doherty is not immune to PTSD. He experiences an instance of WWI flashbacks during the narrative.

The Fairfax Incident is the first book I've read dealing with the consequences of WWI that is set in the U.S. The impact of Germany's defeat on German-Americans is central to the plot. The author doesn't excuse the behavior of many of the German-American characters, but he does explain it.

The novel ends as more of an espionage thriller than a mystery. Readers will learn whodunit, but there is an ongoing national security crisis involving the events leading up to WWII that is not resolved. Presumably, there will be a sequel in which Doherty will continue to distinguish himself in service to his country.

I consider The Fairfax Incident a thought provoking and suspenseful novel.

3.5

I didn't expect this book to be this entertaining. I read it all in one sitting.

The Fairfax Incident is a noirish story that takes place between the two world wars. The protagonist is not what you'd call an honest man. You see, Charlie Doherty used to be a cop, a crooked one at that. Now he is a private investigator thanks to a very wealthy man whose son he'd saved.
Throughout the book, Charlie grows on you, though. Actually, he does that right away even though he himself describes the things he used to do while he was 'on the take'. It turns out, Charlie Doherty is not all that crooked.

As for this particular story, a seemingly simple case of a suicide grows into something much larger and unexpected.

ARC received from Polis Books via NetGalley

Charlie Doherty, an ex-detective who now works for a very rich and supportive client. He’s got it made, makes more money than he knows what to do with, his clientele are now the rich and famous, but is the money worth it, and is he really working for what he believes in?
This book starts out with a bang, I immediately fell in love with ole Charlie. I loved his banter, his thoughts, the way he did business. He is the true 1933 detective, without the trench coat. He’s had a little checkered past, but he is now in a much better place and doesn’t have to put up with the diplomacy or bureaucracy of the police department. He is now investigating an accidental shooting, or was it a suicide? Then the dead bodies start to mount up as the suspense increases. This was a fast enjoyable read. I would say it is a gumshoe mystery, and he kind of reminds me of Cormoran Strike, my other private investigator I enjoy reading.
The only downside was towards the end, I got lost in trying to keep straight all that was going on, a lot of action and a lot of names, so much happens in the last part of the book. But do not let that keep you from reading this one.
I thank Net Galley and Polis Books for allowing me to receive an ARC copy for my honest review. This one gets 5*****’s. I thoroughly enjoyed it and highly recommend if you enjoy Detective stories.

SERIOUSLY!? I JUST CAN'T WAIT FOR THE SECOND BOOK OF THIS SERIES TO COME OUT!!!!! (Although, this book hasn't even been released yet ;p)

I originally picked up this book because of the cover, and I could tell this book falls into Historical Mystery genre, which is my favorite of all.

I am soooo glad I picked up this book because it was absolutely a page turner! I couldn't stop reading! In fact, I gave up 2 nights of sleep to finish reading this book.  And those 2 days, I just couldn't help but abandon house chores because I needed to find out what was coming up next!

Only the thing I wished I had known before I started reading this book was that this book ISN'T a standalone book.  Although it doesn't say it officially, this book is the first of its series for sure because the whole story doesn't complete within this book.  So when I reached the end of the book, I was left quite shocked.

"I don't care what you may have heard or read about my husband's death, Mr. Doherty, but I can assure you it was not a suicide. It was murder, plain and simple."

In New York City, 1933, Mr. Fairfax, rich and the owner of a life insurance company, was found dead. He shot himself in the head and was declared he died in an "accident" in order to protect the family from big scandal.

Ex-cop Charlie Doherty, who was living off with big checks which were paid by his rich clients, was hired by the widow Mrs. Fairfax to find out "why" her husband killed himself. Since he has taken this job, some group of people with a gray overcoat were after him to take him down. Some people he has spoken to are also found dead later. He finds himself in the middle of a big conspiracy.

And when a man of well-organized and planned nature, such as Mr. Fairfax, takes an out of his character action, there is always a woman behind it. The woman is a royalty. She is beautiful, intelligent, mysterious, and cunning. But what is she hiding? What kind of influence had she had on Mr. Fairfax? Their true relationship?

Would you like to find out more??

This book is filled with incidents and happenings, there is no time for you to get bored!! I found myself learning new information and connections through the pages, and it was truly captivating how a suicide of a quiet man is just "the tip of the iceberg." I can't wait to find out how this story ends in the next book!

“The Fairfax Incident” by Terrence McCauley is a classic “gumshoe” mystery set in New York City in 1933. The story is a first-person narrative by Charles “Charlie” Doherty, a detective “making a damned fine living making my wealthy clients feel like I genuinely care about their ivory-tower troubles.” The plot flows effortlessly, and the details slowly come into focus in an easy natural way as part of the conversations that Charlie is having with the reader.

Charlie has a somewhat checkered past handling the occasional dirty job as “Chief Carmichael’s Black Hand.” He is called to the Fairfax mansion to meet with Mrs. Eleanor Blythe Fairfax. Her husband killed himself, and she really wants to know was why. Charlie is sure that throwing enough money at the problem could do the trick.

The story has the classic noir feel: the city, the rain, the cynical PI, the money, the big question. New York is a character just as much as are the people, and little details highlight all the trappings of society and politics. There are blown fuses, elevators, influential gossip columns, private clubs, and coat checks, all the ins and outs of the time. It was New York in 1933, and Charlie knows it well.

“But there’s really no such thing as a nice, quiet walk in Manhattan. Trucks were always backfiring. The sound of pneumatic hammers pounding away at concrete or asphalt was never too far away. Car horns honked and people cursed. Throw in the flutter of pigeon wings for good measure and that was as tranquil as New York City got. It’s a whole lot of different sounds all mixed together in one big urban symphony, but it’s usually the same sounds heard over and over. That’s why when you heard something new, you knew it.”

Charlie has a classic PI sense of humor; “I’m afraid my trench coat is at the cleaner’s.” There are figurative clichés that set the stage as well. For example, the traffic was as packed as a cross-town trolley at rush hour; the man was crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and the exasperated, “Who the hell’s going to shoot me out here? A cow?” Oh, and do not forget McCauley’s shout-out for his cigar stores.


I received a copy of “The Fairfax Incident” from Terrence McCauley and Polis Books. I do not read a lot of “noir” but I loved this one and highly recommend it. It is easy to read and very entertaining. It had a compelling mystery and a murder without all the blood and gore and mess. However, be careful, you might just laugh right out loud as you read.

In 1933 New York City, detective Charlie Doherty is hired by a wealthy widower to investigate her husband's death. It has been ruled a suicide, but she thinks it might have been murder. This is the story of how he investigates and finds out what happened to Mr. Fairfax.
I really liked this book! I found Charlie to be a likeable character and the writing was excellent! I want to read more by this author. I hope he writes more books about Detective Doherty!

Thought the Fairfax Incident by Terrence McCauley was quite good. It had a lot of intriguing elements that kept me hooked throughout. I am interested if there is an additional book that follows this one, and if so I would be very interested in reading it. I really liked the mystery aspect of this book, where every turn of the page see,ed to have a new wrinkle. I would for sure recommend this book!