On a beautiful night in a second-tier American city, a beautiful astrophysicist with the clichéd everything to live for shoots herself dead with a .22. Tough-talking detective Mike Hoolihan, quickly summoned to the scene, has witnessed every sort of victim: "Jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters." But this case is different. Mike has known the young woman for years--she's the daughter, it turns out, of Mike's mentor, Colonel Tom Rockwell. And the colonel is desperate to find a perp, despite massive evidence to the contrary. In Night Train, Martin Amis has fixed his sights on the American female--with a difference. Mike is in fact a woman--a hulking, chain-smoking, deep-voiced alcoholic who comes complete with a squalid family background and a none-too-happy foreground. She even lives in a building next to the proverbial night train and can't survive without her tape with eight different versions of the R & B "hymn to the low rent." Did this novel begin as narrative flexing, yet another test the hypertalented author--and number-one Elmore Leonard fan--wanted to pose to himself? If so, he has passed with flying colors. True, Mike's search occasionally pushes her up against pulp pathos, but mostly the genre keeps Amis true. "Police are pretty blasé about ballistics. Remember the Kennedy assassination and 'the magic bullet'? We know that every bullet is a magic bullet. Particularly the .22 roundnose. When a bullet enters a human being, it has hysterics. As if it knows it shouldn't be there." Mike spends her time weighing the evidence, wishing it would point to murder, and letting us in on some current police realities. Whatever television tells us, in real life (not to mention postmodern crime fiction), there's no neat solution. Even that old standard, the good cop-bad cop approach, no longer works: "It's not just that Joe Perp is on to it, having seen good cop-bad cop a million times on reruns of Hawaii Five-O. The only time bad cop was any good was in the old days, when he used to come into the interrogation room every ten minutes and smash your suspect over the head with the yellow pages." With such discourses, Amis is stretching the rubber band of his book's realism. But in the end, all his fancy footwork doesn't stop us from admiring and pitying his heroine, and hoping she won't board the ultimate night train: suicide.

From School Library Journal
YA?"Suicide is the night train, speeding your way to darkness." Detective Mike Hoolihan is a case-hardened policewoman, but this case is different. The dead woman is Jennifer Rockwell, the daughter of Mike's friend (and boss), Colonel Tom Rockwell, head of criminal investigation. Even though all the evidence points to suicide, Colonel Tom asks Mike to take another look. Everyone agrees that Jennifer had everything; she was beautiful, a brilliant astrophysicist with a promising career, in love with a professor at the university. Why suicide? As Mike probes the secrets of the deceased woman's life, she is forced to re-examine her own, and the decision she makes at the end of her investigation says as much about her as it does about Jennifer, or Colonel Tom. The author's portrayal of the conflicts and complexities of a criminal investigation is utterly convincing, the dialogue is authentic, and the writing is both spare and powerful. YAs who like detective stories will find themselves pulled into this investigation.?Molly Connally, Kings Park Library, Fairfax County, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This intriguing new work from the ever gritty, disturbing Amis (e.g., The Information, LJ 5/1/95) is a sort of anti-police procedural, following all the rules and then blowing them away at the end to reach for something different. Detective Mike Hoolihan is a tough woman, on the force for years and currently recovering from the alcohol abuse that can go with a high-stress job. Now she has her toughest assignment yet. Jennifer Rockwell, the picture-perfect daughter of top cop Colonel Tom, has deliberately blown out her brains, using not one but three bullets, and the colonel is convinced it's murder. Hoolihan investigates, finds odd little facts (lithium use, a pick-up in a bar), and concludes that Jennifer was leaving clues to something. Tension builds as the reader awaits impatiently for the revelation of some dark secret, and at first it is a disappointment when none comes. But soon the anti-climax starts to feel right: beyond thrills, we've learned something important about how the human psyche really works. Recommended for most collections.-?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Atlantic Monthly, Frank Kermode
So this is a serious novel. This police is investigating not just a suicide and not just human failure, intelligible unhappiness at the thought of the urban and terrestrial voids, but, ultimately, horror at the voids of a universe in which human felicity and misery are inconceivably trivial emotions, and the night train alone makes sense. To argue that all the book's ambitions are realized would be to say far too much, but it is right to emphasize that Night Train is serious, because the shadow of its famous tough-boy author will probably fall across it and prevent many people from seeing it as such. That is what happened with another of Amis's shorter novels, Time's Arrow. And his most recent previous book, The Information (admittedly not among his best), was pretty well drowned out by the clamor about his teeth and his advance. His own fault, for encouraging the hype? Maybe, but that isn't really literary business. There is, on the page that we have somehow to read clearly, some authentic power, a large, pure ambition, a hunger to be serious.

Natasha Walter, The Manchester Guardian (U.K.)
For the first time he has created heroines who are defined not by their underwear and the size of their breasts, but by their work and relationships and human disappointments.... It is impossible to overstate the difference that this current of ordinary sympathy makes to Amis's imaginative world. It makes a juddering contrast with the plot's nihilism, and that unresolved conflict between love and cynicism gives this book a haunting, unsettling quality that Amis has never achieved before.

The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani
...a virtuoso performance. The book lacks the literary weight and ambition of books like The Information and London Fields, but it's a deliciously readable, highly polished diversion, a testament to its author's Nabokovian love of language and games, and his utter ease in delineating the seamy underside of modern life.... Night Train may not stack up against Amis's best fiction, but as one of his entertainments, it's a superior piece of work.

From AudioFile
Author and performer combine well here to produce a moody, tense recounting of a suspected suicide and its aftermath. Asked by her mentor to investigate the death of his beautiful and brilliant daughter, a female police officer with a history of alcoholism must oversee both a physical and psychological autopsy of the deceased. This process reveals as much about the lady cop who's seen it all as it does about the "victim." Police jargon abounds, and Hamilton handles it as easily, as she does the transitions between narrative and stream-of-consciousness styles. Her world-weary tone suggests that the ending will be less than upbeat. The shortened form of this psychological thriller requires careful listening. J.B.G. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Kirkus Reviews
Amis, who seems to be turning himself into a British Thomas Berger, continues his twisty tour of formulaic genres (The Information, 1995, etc.) with his most deadpan pastiche yet: the police investigation of an impossible suicide. Mike Hoolihan, a beefy female detective in an unnamed ``second-echelon American city,'' is called back from Asset Forfeiture to Homicide to break the news of his daughter's death to Colonel Tom Rockwell, the grand old man of the police department. Jennifer Rockwell was an astrophysicist who had everything to live for--brains, looks, the world's best lover, and unlimited career horizons--but who put a gun in her mouth anyway. Colonel Tom, of course, can't believe it's suicide, and asks Mike (so completely Jennifer's opposite that she's constantly mistaken for a man on the phone) to follow the case. She doesn't have to follow any further than the postmortem to see that Jennifer evidently shot herself three times--laying the case as wide open as her corpse. If Jennifer didn't kill herself, who murdered her? Her gentle live-in, philosophy-of-science prof Trader Faulkner? Bax Denziger, her bemused boss in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Institute of Physical Problems? Arn Debs, the jovial, roundheeled traveling salesman she'd hooked up with? And if Jennifer did manage to kill herself, why did she do it--who was the person inside who made her pull the trigger? Mike follows up a glittering trail of modish cultural rubble- -Jennifer's surprising use of lithium, her maliciously erratic recent work at Terrestrial Magnetism, her careful annotations in her copy of Making Sense of Suicide--to produce the latest in a stream of anti-detective stories that goes back all the way to Billy Budd. Amis's hypnotic way with a phrase produces a collage asparkle with bits of broken glass--and perhaps the most jaundiced, knowing book ever written about ignorance. Quite an accomplishment. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

January 1998

As the title might suggest, Martin Amis's new novel, Night Train, is swift and sometimes dark and mysterious as it surges forward with incredible speed. A captivating mystery of betrayal and deception, Night Train is somewhat of a departure for Amis, one of the world's most acclaimed novelists. This latest offering fuses all of his stylistic brilliance with the elements of a classic film noir mystery. Amis, an Englishman, has long been fascinated by American culture and dialogue, and Night Train benefits from this keen interest -- the language is dead-on and the landscape eerily familiar.

Set in "Anytown, USA," Night Train perfectly captures the anxiety, paranoia, and entanglements that fuel a big-city police investigation. A 15-year veteran of the force, Detective Mike Hoolihan has risen from walking a beat to solving robberies to investigating homicides. She's seen it all, but one case -- this case -- has gotten under her skin.

When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career cop -- now top brass -- takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it. Especially her father, Colonel Tom. Hoolihan, longtime colleague and friend of Colonel Tom, is ready to "put the case down": suicide, case closed. But Colonel Tom asks Hoolihan to do the one thing any grieving father would ask -- take a second look.

Not since his celebrated novel Money has Amis turned his focus on America to such remarkable effect. Combining brilliant wordplay and the elements of a classic whodunit, Amis exposes a world where surfaces are suspect (no matter how perfect), paranoia is justified (no matter how pervasive), and power and pride are brought low by the hidden recesses of our humanity.

SYNOPSIS

Night Train by Martin Amis is a short, sharp shock of a mystery about the apparent suicide of Jennifer Rockwell, the brilliant and beautiful beloved daughter of Colonel Tom, top cop in a major American city. Veteran detective Mike Hoolihan, who spent some weeks drying out in her boss's home several years earlier and thus feels beholden to him, is asked to investigate. What transpires is a tour of Jennifer's perfect universe that simultaneously takes Hoolihan on her own inner journey. Amis has worked in the crime/mystery genre before with his early novel Other People and recently with London Fields.

FROM THE CRITICS

Allen Barra

Martin Amis' Night Train is being billed as a kind of serious author's holiday, a genre vacation between his thick, clever, mostly "serious" works. The Brit press is roasting him for it. Well, screw them. Many other serious novelists have taken a little time off now and then -- there are certainly those of us who prefer what Graham Greene called his "entertainments" to his longer, presumably less entertaining books.

And Night Train is entertaining. It's a detective story about the suicide or murder of a young woman who had everything those around her wanted: beauty, wit, vivacity, health and a stimulating career. The characters, particularly Detective "Mike" Hoolihan -- the quotes are because Mike is female -- are crisp and entertaining. And the solution to the death is original while remaining faithful to murder classic conventions. This last point is no small one: As Borges once observed, the American detective story is generally a disappointment precisely because its solutions don't satisfy the curiosity that the plot has stirred.

Night Train is a disappointment for opposite reasons. Amis has never been much interested in character, motivation and plot, which aren't considered major virtues in an era when technique holds court, but at the kid's table of crime fiction, they're essential. You feel as if Amis does care about his characters, perhaps more than he's cared about most of those in his previous novels, but doesn't know how to give voice to that concern. Night Train feels rootless. "Mike" is convincing as neither a woman nor an American, and the unnamed city Amis places her in gives off no heat. (One suspects it's a pastiche of American big cities that Amis has glimpsed during book tours.) It's true that Elmore Leonard, one of Amis' idols, also doesn't waste a lot of time in description of local fauna, but with Leonard's deft paintbrush strokes, he doesn't need a lot of time to make you feel as if you're in a particular place. The city in Night Train is like Gertrude Stein's Oakland: There's no there.

To cover these deficiencies Amis falls back on the mechanics of the murder mystery plot -- a peculiar homage to Leonard, whose books (like most of Dashiell Hammett's) aren't mysteries. Amis may not like it, but the author Night Train draws most comparison with is Raymond Chandler, for whom Amis has a well-known contempt. The book's best lines -- "Guys? She combed them out of her hair" and "You wouldn't pray for a body like that -- but something was wrong with it. It was dead." -- sound much more like Chandler than like Leonard, as does Mike Hoolihan's Philip Marlowe-like narration. "Suicide is the night train," she tells us, "speeding your way to darkness ... this train takes you into the night, and leaves you there." To which Marlowe might have replied, "What did it matter where you lay once you are dead? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you weren't bothered by things like that." -- Salon

Michiko Katukani

[Amis] virtuoso performance...and quicksilver narrative...grabs the reader and refuses to let go.
-- The New York Times

Time Magazine

One of the most gifted writers of his generation.

Library Journal

This intriguing new work from the ever-gritty, disturbing Amis is a sort of anti-police procedural, following all the rules and then blowing them away at the end to reach for something different. Detective Mike Hoolihan is a tough woman, on the force for years and currently recovering from the alcohol abuse that can go with a high-stress job. Now she has her toughest assignment yet. Jennifer Rockwell, the picture-perfect daughter of top cop Colonel Tom, has deliberately blown out her brains, using not one but three bullets, and the colonel is convinced it's murder. Hoolihan investigates, finds odd little facts (lithium use, a pick-up in a bar), and concludes that Jennifer was leaving clues to something. Tension builds as the reader awaits impatiently for the revelation of some dark secret, and at first it is a disappointment when none comes. But soon the anti-climax starts to feel right: beyond thrills, we've learned something important about how the human psyche really works.

Library Journal