Hurwitz, Gregg: The Crime Writer

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Like the title says, Gregg Hurwitz's protagonist Andrew Danner is a crime writer, the author of a popular series of detective novels. At the beginning of the book he wakes up in a hospital: a tumor was removed from his brain after he suffered a grand mal seizure--over the dead body of his ex-fiancée. He was found with a knife in his hands. Her blood is still under his fingernails. And everybody thinks he did it, including--on bad days--Andrew himself, who doesn't remember whether he did it or not because of the tumor. He spends the rest of the book trying to piece together what happened that night. What he uncovers is a murder plot far more intricate than any he's published. Meanwhile, he  writes about his amateur sleuthing as it's happening as a means of processing the information. His account is the book that we're reading.

My only reservation about The Crime Writer has to do with its dialogue. When he's talking to authority figures--when he should know better--Danner is wont to come out with tough-guy lines that seem a bit too made-for-TV. Then again, as I said, this is a book that purports to be written by a guy whose other books have been made into cheesy movies, so the over-the-top dialogue may be intentional. I've no complaints about the book otherwise. I think most readers will be surprised, as I was, by who done it and why, and by the book's complex plot which, however, never becomes to difficult to follow.