A twisty, delicious, complex mystery

Hi Five Joe Ide Mulholland Books

The cardinal sin in mystery reviewing is revealing too much of the plot. That’s not a danger with Joe Ide’s crime novels. It is humanly impossible to summarize his dizzying, madcap storylines.

Ide’s lauded crime series features private eye Isaiah Quintabe — “IQ” for short — an African-american investigator living in East Long Beach, Calif. Ide, who is Japanese-american, grew up in East L.A., where many of his friends were African-american, His favourite books were Sherlock Holmes stories.

On the surface, the IQ novels appear to have little in common with the Holmes tales, which turn on the power of deduction. Unlike Holmes, Isaiah sometimes has to get physical with evildoers and he also enjoys “getting physical” with beautiful women. Still, working on a shoestring budget and shut out of law enforcement databases, Isaiah’s greatest asset is, like Holmes, his brainpower.

The mystery in Hi Five, the fourth novel in the IQ series, is complicated. An arms dealer named Angus Byrne reaches out to Isaiah because his daughter, Christiana, is accused of killing a customer in her Newport Beach made-toorder clothing store.

Isaiah discovers that Christiana suffers from what’s now called dissociative identity disorder. Christiana harbours multiple personalities, five of them to be exact: Jasper, for instance, is a tough teenager from Arizona; and Marlene is a “party girl.” None of her “alters” was present when the murder took place, so Isaiah must corral all of these personalities to reconstruct what happened that night.

In trademark style,

Ide cultivates a variety of subplots. Not only do storylines proliferate, but so, too, do points of view. And, Ide often presents events simultaneously, so chapters of this novel don’t always progress in time, but, rather, layer atop one another.

The result is a crime novel that gives readers a sense of the totality of life in all its possibility: comedy, violence, irrationality and heartbreak.