Pen & Ink Reviews

Blackout is the fourth installment in Alex Segura’s series that follows the exploits of drunken sports writer turned tenuously sober private investigator, Pete Fernandez. The threads of Pete’s past and his prior cases tangle together in this story in a knot of betrayal, twisted loyalties, blackmail, and murder.

The pacing in the first half of the story is slow as Segura sets the stage and reminds the reader of Pete’s past encounters with different characters. That said, the pace picks up and the plot grows more taut around the halfway mark. As a growing storm barrels toward southern Florida, so too does Pete race—headlong and recklessly—closer toward answers about a shadowy religious sect linked to dead end police investigations, a mystery from his past, and a recent spate of violent murders.

Pete is a protagonist who is as swamped in guilt, self loathing, and self sabotage as he once was in alcohol. Even so, he remains sympathetic but not always likable, intelligent but not always smart, loyal but not always present. Segura portrays Florida in all its humid glory: riddled with drugs, gangs, dirty cops, politics, cults, and brutal sunshine. Miami in particular comes to life on the pages, sweltering and seedy, an amalgamation of cultures, seedy and gentrified, and always bolstered with a layer of pastel paint. The mystery is a layered one with a number of players, each driven by their own agenda. The past has very much come back to haunt the present in this gritty crime novel.

The mystery in this particular book wrapped up in a way that made the story suitable to be read as a standalone, but I think with the nuances of Pete’s interactions with the people in his life and the culmination of several threads, readers would benefit from reading the first three books before diving into this one. It also sets the stage with a cliffhanger for the next in the series. With a vivid setting, a struggling protagonist, a multilayered plot, and a wealth of sly dialogue, Blackout is a solid entry in the Southern noir genre.

Recommended for fans of noir crime fiction set in south Florida and featuring private investigators with personal demons.