The Bottom Line: A double-shot of murder, dark humor and white-knuckled suspense that works on every level. Dead Exit will wow newcomers and satisfy series die-hards.
The third entry in Michael Balter’s Marty Schott and Bo Bishop series brings the sharp-tongued business partners home to Portland, Oregon, and gives them a crisis that feels more intimate, more destabilizing and ultimately more revealing. The book opens with a 1 a.m. phone call informing Marty that Tadeo Ramírez, the husband of Bo’s sister Laura, has been shot to death outside Shangri-La, a strip club owned by Alex Danilenko.
Marty and Bo, now operating a variety of businesses including a plastics company, a sawmill, a microbrewery and a convenience-store company, rush to the scene. They find Detective Chuck Adams, who remembers them from an earlier murder and carries the air of a man who has no reason to believe trouble ever really left their orbit.
As the investigation promises to identify Tadeo’s killer, Marty and Bo begin uncovering signs of a smuggling operation inside their own company. Where The Vatican Deal had Marty and Bo navigating an outlandish international scheme involving art, the Vatican and the mafia, Dead Exit has them struggling for self-preservation.
But is the series still funny? Hell yes. The book is chock full of memorable one-liners (Marty and Bo “swim in shit and call it soup”). In fact, Marty’s narration remains Balter’s most valuable asset. He’s witty, defensive, observant and always half-aware that his instincts may be making things worse. Bo continues to serve as the steadier counterweight, a more grounded presence whose loyalty to family gives the case immediate emotional force.
The friendship between the two men still does much of the heavy lifting, just as it did in Chasing Money and The Vatican Deal, but here it is tested less by adventurous criminal intrigue than by pressure closing in from every side.In some ways, Dead Exit is a story about systems within families, businesses and crime syndicates. That grounded logistical texture gives the novel a more contemporary and bruising feel than its predecessor. For series fans, the book is a satisfying evolution of Mary and Bo’s character arcs. For new readers, the book offers a strong murder-driven entry point into a thriller series increasingly interested not just in danger, but in consequence.
