Michael Cormany – Lost Daughter

Lost Daughter was nominated for the Private Eye Writers of America’s Shamus Award in 1988. That it did not win shouldn’t deter you from picking up a copy of Lost Daughter if you can find it. In it you will find one of the most original detectives ever to grace the hardboiled genre of detective fiction: Dan Kruger P.I.

Kruger is unique in the world of mystery fiction – a P.I. who is afraid of guns, has a pet rabbit, would rather play guitar than do anything else except get high but still lives by his own code and has a backbone of steel. Detective Dan Kruger is the archetypal antihero. Lost Daughter was Michael Cormany’s freshman release of Kruger and it met with critical if not financial success. Cormany is a good writer who tells a well crafted and executed story with believable dialogue, characters and locations.

Lost daughter is the story of Terrance Dawson a very rich man who resides in a ritzy estate just north of Chicago’s Graham Park district and his efforts to located his missing daugter Asia. The ex-cop Kruger doesn’t have much problem locating the runaway for attention Asia but things get a little more complicated when Asia’s boyfriend turns up dead with all the clues pointing to her. It isn’t long before Kruger finds himself embroiled in a case far beyond anything he had ever seen before and people around him start dropping like flies.

Lost Daughter was a great freshman effort and if you can find a copy you owe it to yourself to give it a read. Cormany doesn’t write fiction anymore he threw it in and now makes a living writing non-fiction for magazines etcetera. It is a shame that a gift like his is being used on non-fiction but in the meantime we do have a few more Kruger novels to help assuage the pain of his loss to the dark side of publishing.

Lost Daughter
Michael Cormany
Leisure Books; Reprint edition (March 1991)

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