Street Music - Timothy Hallinan

Poke Rafferty, always the champion of the underdog in any situation, is a good man. And now that Tim Hallinan has decided to end his Poke Rafferty series at nine books – Street Music being that ninth book – I’m going to have to learn to do without a new Poke Rafferty novel every year. A big part of the overall appeal of the Poke Rafferty books is their Bangkok setting and the little family that Poke, his Thai wife Rose, and Miaow, the little street girl they adopted several books back, have stitched together for themselves. The crime-fighting thrills along the way (and make no mistake, these are first rate thrillers) turn out to be the icing on what is already a damn fine cake.

 

The big surprise in Street Music is that it is not really a book about Poke Rafferty. Instead, this is a book about his daughter, one that explores Miaow’s origins and why the five-or-six-year-old (no one knows her real age prior to the revelations of Street Music) was living on Bangkok’s streets when Poke took her into his home eight years earlier. It took Miaow a long time to learn to trust in the permanence of her new family, but she finally got there. Now, it is not so surprising that she is reacting to the presence of her new baby brother pretty much the way any teen who unexpectedly loses only-child status might react: with a purposeful indifference to the boy and a whole lot of  jealousy at all the attention he is getting.

 

Poke, too, is finding it a bit difficult to adjust to little Frank’s high rank in the family hierarchy. In addition to Poke having to spend his nights on a lumpy couch while Rose tends to Frank’s every need, the Rafferty apartment is almost constantly filled with Rose’s friends, all there to help and to admire Frank, so Poke is starting to feel a bit unnecessary. With all the ruckus, he has become a travel writer who can’t write, can’t sleep, and can’t get much of his wife’s attention. Poke badly needs something to keep him busy, so when one of regulars at Leon and Toot’s (formerly the Expat Bar) goes missing, Poke is more than willing to investigate the old man’s disappearance.

 

Then it happens.  Someone shows up at Poke’s door whom he never expected to see, someone with the power to tear his little family apart forever. And it turns out that Poke kind of likes her.

 

Tim Hallinan

Street Music is a fitting farewell to Poke Rafferty in the sense that he has reached a stage of life in which it is appropriately time for him to slow down a little and start thinking more about the future of his wife and two children. Even now, although Poke cannot quite resist the familiar urge to help people who are so lost that they can’t help themselves anymore, his family is always on his mind, influencing just how much he is willing to put himself at risk to help others.

 

So, take care of yourself and the family, Poke. We are going to miss each and every one of you.

 

Bottom Line: Street Music is probably not the sendoff that most longtime Poke Rafferty fans expected it would be, but it is a satisfying enough last look at Poke and everyone in his world. The only quarrel I have with the novel is more a technical one than a plot-based one. The book is broken into three parts, with Part I being largely the set-up to what will follow next, Part II being the (I think) too-long backstory of the character who knocks so unexpectedly on Poke’s door, and Part III being the resolution of the book’s two plot lines. Part II, at something like 130 pages of the e-book’s 366 total pages, probably because I already knew this is Poke’s last hurrah, just seemed to go on forever, and I grew frustrated as the remaining page-count kept dwindling away for so long. My reaction to Part II may be more a compliment to my devotion to the Poke Rafferty character than to anything else, but I know that I would have gladly traded some of the pages of Part II for additional pages in Parts I or III.