If there has ever been a more appealing setup than what author Stuart M. Kaminsky provides for Lew Fonesca, his new literary gumshoe, then I am not aware of it. I was intrigued by the intro inside the book cover, and then utterly entranced by the forward. A book promises a lot when I am hooked before I have even finished reading the prologue.

Stuart Kaminsky is an award-winning author of more than 60 novels starring numerous detectives with his Lew Fonesca series being the latest. This is the 6th novel in this regime, and it appears that Fonesca will be settling in for a long run. Kaminsky is a prior winner of the Edgar Award and also a recipient of the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America. Once again, I am embarrassed to admit that I am late to the game, for this is the first Kaminsky book that I have read. There will surely be many to follow.

What more can one ask than a great read, fascinating characters, and a story that takes place in sunny Sarasota, Florida, probably the nicest city in that state? Well, quirky characters for one, and this book is filled chock a block with them. This author is nothing if not imaginative with each character having the kind of witty dialogue that adds great piquancy to the story. This is one of the most entertaining novels that I have ever had the pleasure of coming across.

"Bright Futures" is characterized by such sparkling dialogue that reading this book brought more than a smile to my face. I often found myself chuckling out loud, much to the annoyance of my wife who was trying to concentrate on reading her novel. She later returned the favor by reading this novel and chuckling equally as heartily while I was trying to concentrate on more serious fare.  

Unfortunately, it turned out that there actually is one more thing that I could have asked for in a story that promised so much, and this would have been an ending to match the ingeniousness of everything else. With the fabulous setup and the world class dialogue, I was  more than hopeful, expectant even, for a resolution that would have been as inventive as the story. Regrettably, Kaminsky falls flat on his face with a resolution that proves to be disappointing in the extreme. He must have run out of ideas after inventing so many wonderful characters. 

The prologue begins with Lew Fonesca losing his zest for life after his beloved wife was killed in a hit and run accident on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. Shortly afterwards he got into his car and left Chicago for good with little more than his signature Cubs hat, another sign of a hopeless cause, to remind him of his home town. Lew kept driving and driving until his car broke down behind a Dairy Queen in Sarasota, Florida. Taking this as a propitious omen, he stayed right there and moved into a run down apartment behind the DQ. He soon tentatively started a new life as a process server. You gotta love a guy like this. A man of few words, he states, "My name is Lew Fonesca. I find people." Simple. Elegant.  

Fonesca is the lead in this character parade as a man who has forgotten how to laugh, so his 80 year old therapist demands that he bring a new joke to their every session. Lew doesn't feel the need to get a new car, so he takes a bicycle everywhere he needs to go in Sarasota. But his most endearing trait is that he asks everyone, even people who he has just met, for their favorite opening line in a book. He feels that you can tell a lot about a person by knowing this. 

Lew is not a fun guy, but there is something about him that is trustworthy and likable, so he has already gathered around him a small coterie of characters who are equally off the wall. Besides his octogenarian therapist, Ann Hurwitz, he is tentatively attracted to Sally Porovsky, a high school social worker. Then there is Victor Woo, a Chinese man who lives in Lew's apartment and spends the night in a sleeping bag on the floor in the front room. Why? Well, Victor was the man who drove that car that killed Lew's wife, so he has stuck by him ever since, searching for a way to balance his indebtedness and wipe the slate clean. Talk about an oddball pair. No one that Lew meets seems to understand this setup, but to Lew it all seems perfectly natural.

His elderly landlady is the occasional recipient of care packages from the fast food restaurants that Lew frequents. Well, Lew feels grateful because the rent is just right, even if the apartment is far too large for his needs. He has developed another friend in Ames McKinney, a seventy year old former con who would have gone to jail for life had not Lew talked him out of murdering his ex-partner for cheating him. Now Ames stops by and occasionally provides a helping hand. 

And these are only the costarring characters in a warmup act for all of the screwballs that Lew investigates in the course of a case where he has been hired to exonerate a high school student charged with murdering an elderly man. The victim is wealthy beyond belief but he doesn't seem to have had a friend in the world. Even his daughter, the only family member he has left, has abandoned him and left the state for parts unknown.

As I have said, the ending was a disappointment. With all of the great characters in this book, it seems to me that Kaminsky could have picked a better person to commit the dastardly deed. I had to knock off several grades in my review to give the book a bare minimum recommendation of B+ when it should have ranked up there with the best of the novels. So, please read it for the entertainment value alone without expecting the story to resolve itself into any kind of an intellectually satisfying conclusion. 2008, Tom Doherty Associates, 304 pages.