Police at the Funeral centers around Shem Rosenkrantz, who has been dying bit by bit for twenty years. Chloe is in the nuthouse and Rosenkrantz has taken up with a sharp dame who is only with him because he is due to come into some money. This book is not really a take off on Jim Thompson except to the extent that its focus is this tortured, drowning character. This book takes the reader on a journey into despair and, as the reader, listening to this narrator, you wonder if he is really as innocent as he makes himself out to be or is he just justifying himself and his actions to the readers. ( )

“Police at the Funeral” is the third novel in Ariel Winter’s “Twenty Year Death” trilogy. Like its predecessors, it is written in the style of a famous mystery writer, this one being a pastiche of Jim Thompson. Its protagonist Shem Rosenkrantz was a successful novelist and screenwriter in earlier works of the trilogy. Here he’s a washed up alcoholic – unable to write, financially in debt to everyone he knows, hated by his son whom he hasn’t seen in years, and struggling to maintain his wife in the private mental hospital in California where she’s spent the last 10 years. That may sound like an unlikely starting point for a novel, but if you know Jim Thompson’s work, you know things will go rapidly downhill. And they do, as Shem finds himself running from the law (for a murder) and from organized crime (who is after him for his debts). The tale is grim and gritty, and pervaded by a sense of unavoidable doom. The finale is practically a relief. ( )