Switch by William Bayer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"[...] this man was trying to create people as much as to destroy them. [...] He killed them, certainly. But to use the parts his own way. So in a sense we could say he was a creator. Destroyer and also creator."

William Bayer's Switch (1984) is one of the best police procedurals I have ever read. For about half of the novel the author manages to avoid the awful clichés of the genre. Also, he succeeds in setting up the plot in a way that compels the reader to continue reading until the very end, even if the last part of the book is not as impressive as the first.

We meet Lt. Frank Janek at the funeral of his friend, a retired New York detective who has committed suicide. After the funeral the Chief of Detectives hands Janek - who is considered a star detective - a difficult and bizarre case. Two women, a teacher in an exclusive school for girls and a call girl, were killed and their heads have been switched. It takes Janek and his team quite some time to find a connection between the two victims.

Meanwhile Janek is trying to find the reasons for his friend's suicide. As he zeroes on the "switch" killer, further linkage between the two cases emerges. The lieutenant gets romantically involved with Caroline, a successful young photographer who is helping him in the case. Atypically for police procedurals Caroline portrayal is better written than that of Janek himself: she feels a more real person than he does.

The chapter titled Criminal Conversation distinguishes itself with accomplished prose and psychological plausibility. But what I like the most is the growing network of connections between the two cases and between main characters in the plot. The reader will also notice that the title of the novel can be interpreted in multiple ways.

An outstanding procedural! Now I want to read the author's Peregrine, a novel - also featuring Lieutenant Janek - that won the Edgar Award in 1982.

Four stars.





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