Rachel and Dash have a new client. Well, three new clients. A trio of transvestite working girls want Rachel to investigate the death of one of their own. Rosalinda’s throat was slashed on Halloween right after the Greenwich Village parade. Finding her killer isn’t exactly the NYPD’s top priority—and LaDonna, Chi Chi, and Jasmine are terrified that they’ll be next.
With her cash retainer in hand—and very few leads—Rachel starts digging. What is the connection between Rosalinda and a dead butcher? Soon, with the help of Chi Chi’s mini-dachshund, Clint, Rachel is breaking into a plant in the Meatpacking District. But her future is suddenly on the line when she sets herself up as bait to catch the killer. As Rachel follows a twisting trail with only Dash for protection, she discovers that her foray into “the life” could end with her own untimely death.

IN A NUTSHELL
A disappointing, depressing, dismal novel that tried and failed to make Rachel Alexander into the kind of detective who can be effective at solving murders amongst the transgender prostitutes and organised crime, covert drugs supply chains of Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. The violently abusive environment was displayed in all its despair and pain, but Rachel was as out of place there as a hog roast at a Bar Mitzvah. I believed the environment. I didn’t believe in her ability to survive it.

Having enjoyed the first three Rachel Alexander & Dash novels, I went into ‘The Long Good Boy’ expecting to see Rachel doing her usual thing of using her background to blend into an environment, learn about the people, and sniff out the murderer, sometimes by leveraging her dog training knowledge, sometimes just relying on her insight, empathy and sense of humour. 

It seemed to me that Carol Lea Benjamin was trying to do something different in this novel. She’d obviously researched the challenges faced by trans sexworkers in the Manhattan Meatpacking District. She succeeded in showing how desperate their lives are, the risks that they’re forced to take as they live their nocturnal lives, working with abusive pimps, predatory cops, and potentially violent customers who see the prostitutes only as meat. 

She also came up with a decent murder mystery, involving the death of a meatpacking manager and a prostitute.

The problem was that Rachel Alexander was so far out of her depth that just by being there, she put herself, her dog, and the people who hired her at risk. The lowest point of the book for me was watching Rachel come up with an elaborate plan to train a dog to open a window to give her access to a building, forgetting that the window was so high up she’d have to swing into it and forgetting to plan a way out once she was inside. This was too much to swallow. It was made worse when, later in the book, she gained access to the same place simply by getting someone to provide a distraction.

I was disappointed by this book. It wasn’t the kind of book I’d been expecting to read. It was darker, grimmer, and more violent. Yet it didn’t quite succeed in being a hardboiled crime novel because Rachel Alexander just isn’t tough enough or skilled enough to function in that environment.