James Polkinghorn. Liquid Shades of Blue. Oceanview, 2023.

We have received a number of novels from Oceanview Publishing, we have enjoyed all of them, and that includes the new Liquid Shades of Blue. We have noted occasionally some books are hard to categorize. This is one. It is marketed as a thriller, and it is one in the sense that readers will want to keep turning its pages. But it not a stereotypical thriller. There are no terrorists or gangsters or serial killers out to get anyone. While the two main characters are lawyers, there is no court case or legal wrangling.

Liquid Shades of Blue is primarily a psychological study with a possible crime in the background. But because there is no terrorist or serial killer type, it does not follow the usual so-called psychological thriller where people fear for their lives because of some psychotic or psychopathic character.

The psychology comes mostly from our first-person narrator, Jack Girard. Girard owns a bar in Key West and devotes most of his time and energy to that. He also is a lawyer. He mostly does small cases for customers, but he used to work for his father’s high-powered law firm. We can see, then, that a lot of the psychology is straight out of Freud. For reasons that become obvious, Jack has some daddy issues. He is happy doing what he is doing on the Keys, away from the big-time Miami firm of his father. Everyone, even Jack, calls his father the Duke.

This may sound strange, but the beginning actually had echoes of Camus’ The Stranger. The story begins with Jack learning that his mother has died. He learns this after he wakes up apparently having spent the night with a prostitute, though he remembers nothing of the night before and how he picked her up—if he indeed did pick her up.

Jack is around thirty years old, and his parents were divorced just a few years ago. His father’s phone message with the news says that his mother killed herself. Jack finds that a hard to believe because his mother had a very positive outlook on life, but the evidence seems to point to that conclusion. Sadly, Jack had one sibling, an older brother who did actually commit suicide. Is there something in the family gene pool that contributes to this?

Jack does what he can to investigate his mother’s death. He visits her condo and his father’s new waterfront home. He visits his mother’s parents who are both still living. He reviews his brother’s suicide. His father admits that he visited his mother the day she died to discuss a settlement issue, but he left her still alive. From his time as a Miami lawyer, Jack does have a contact in the police department and one in the FBI to see if he can discover anything that they might have on his mother’s death.

But the tale focuses on Jack and his father. Mr. Girard is a Nietzchean. He became a successful attorney, he would say, because he had a strong will. He tried to instill in his sons the idea of the will to power. Of course, that also suggests that he saw himself as an Übermensch, beyond good and evil. Clever, amoral lawyers can use the laws to their advantage, regardless of a client’s actual guilt or innocence and regardless of whether a suit is right or wrong.

Because he saw her shortly before she died, the Duke indirectly is looking for Jack’s help to clear his name. A true Übermensch, of course, would never ask for help, but Jack takes him at his word and tries to look into things.

Much of the story, then, tells us not so much about the circumstances surrounding the family suicides as it tells us of Jack still trying to resolve his feelings about his father—not that he had been very close to either parent in recent years.

He learns that his mother had a new boyfriend. The boyfriend is a successful businessman and native of Colombia who has put together a healthcare business that makes him millions. The suspicion is that behind the clinics and hospitals, he also markets drugs illegally. So, while Jack never appears to be in danger, he does cross paths with Julio Guzman as he inquires about his mother’s death. There may be some criminal types in the background, but not anyone trying to kill Jack or do him harm.

Liquid Shades of Blue is psychological in the primal sense—mommy’s dead, big brother’s dead, daddy’s distant and insensitive. Jack dropped out of daddy’s pressurized money-making law firm for a simpler life. Jack’s brother dropped out by taking his own life. Did his mother do the same?

I was reminded of another book we read a few years ago, Unwritten. That novel also takes place in southern Florida and involves some hurting people looking for some psychological relief. Liquid Shades of Blue does not have the tale of inner healing that Unwritten has, but it keeps us reading. There is enough action for readers to admit that, yes, this is a thriller of some kind, even if it’s not the kind of thing Grisham, Steele, or Connelly might write. It goes beyond the thriller formula to get at core beliefs.