Recently, I quoted some reviews of a book I hadn’t read because it was written by a high school classmate, Mike Fredrickson. I suggested then that I ought to read his first book now that it was out in paperback. I did.
Not long after I had read The Cinderella Affidavit, Mike was in Minnesota to visit family and I had a chance to have lunch with him.
Not only did we catch up on each other’s lives, I got to tell him how much I enjoyed reading his first book. He got to tell me that he always dreamed of writing a novel and decided at age 50 that the time had come. The reception was unexpected. A publisher who read the manuscript for The Cinderella Affidavit offered a three book contract. (The third was well underway when we met in August.)
A Cinderella affidavit is one presented to a judge to support a request for a search warrant that is based on realistic but not totally real evidence. In the series of events that provided the basis for this novel, a Boston detective was killed during a no-knock search authorized by a warrant based on a less than honest affidavit.
From that real case, the novel takes off. The characters are well-drawn and three dimensional.
In the first few pages I got to know and care about a character who haunted the rest of the book although he died on page nine.
The rather newly-minted attorney who was being engulfed by politics inside a large Boston law firm was older than most of his rookie colleagues. He’d had a career as a scholar of Renaissance poetry and assistant professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. The parade of middle class students headed for corporate jobs and Midwestern suburbia appalled him. (This character shares, coincidentally, many characteristics with his creator.)
The less than honest cop whose affidavit got the search warrant was hardly admirable, but turned out to be less than despicable. (Mike told me this character started out as a minor bad guy, but became more and more a whole "person" as the writing progressed.) The story is well told and paced. I don’t remember getting impatient with extraneous detail or being confused by a lack of explanation. And the plot isn’t simple: Chinese gangsters, Bostonian politics, law firm politics, tensions between police and the courts and attorneys, human beings with failings and strengths, and the pressures of journalism’s demands for stuff that sells.
Michael Fredrickson’s Cinderella Affidavit is one of the best mysteries I’ve read this year. (I know, it’s technically a "police procedural" novel, not a mystery, but I’m not that fussy.) His second book, Witness for the Dead, is more a thriller. If you find Michael Fredrickson’s name on a book in the library or a bookstore, check it out. This one ranks for me with the best of Stephen Greenleaf and Nevada Barr. (I had to look in a couple of the big chain bookstores to find the paperback of Cinderella Affidavit. The hardcovers were all remaindered when the paperback came out.)
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