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Ocean Park #1
Ocean Park
All Detective Matt Conley ever wanted was to raise a family in Ocean Park with his stunning and ambitious wife Lisa. When a corpse is found in his church, Matt begins a journey that reveals corruption and decay in his city and deceit in his marriage. As he searches for the murderer of a local businessman, a gang war erupts for control of the city’s drug trade, and the body count rises. With his reluctant new partner, Detective Lloyd Kendricks, Matt weaves his way through the puzzling connections between street gangs, politicians, bikers, and a private kink club.
Will their unlikely alliance be enough to return Matt's beloved hometown to its halcyon days? And will he find the faith he needs to rebuild his crumbling marriage?
Will their unlikely alliance be enough to return Matt's beloved hometown to its halcyon days? And will he find the faith he needs to rebuild his crumbling marriage?
246 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published October 9, 2015
4 people are currently reading
896 people want to read
About the author
Michael Walsh
3 books78 followersMike Walsh loves mystery!
He attended Boston University, where he became a staffer for the Daily Free Press and earned a degree in journalism. His first professional job was at a public relations and advertising firm, writing press releases that appeared in the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and New England Journal of Engineering. He later became a technical writer, writing and editing jet engine manuals. He relocated to Cincinnati and Florida, where he currently resides. He’s written and studied fiction for years at BU, the University of Cincinnati, and now Jacksonville, where he won the First Coast Writers Festival short story contest and had work published in the UK’s Twisted Tongue and Askew Reviews. He’s an active member of the Bard Society, Florida’s longest-running writers’ workshop.
His novel and dozens of short stories, most of them richly-layered mysteries, take place in New England. Mike and his wife Jean live in Florida with their three sons.
He attended Boston University, where he became a staffer for the Daily Free Press and earned a degree in journalism. His first professional job was at a public relations and advertising firm, writing press releases that appeared in the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and New England Journal of Engineering. He later became a technical writer, writing and editing jet engine manuals. He relocated to Cincinnati and Florida, where he currently resides. He’s written and studied fiction for years at BU, the University of Cincinnati, and now Jacksonville, where he won the First Coast Writers Festival short story contest and had work published in the UK’s Twisted Tongue and Askew Reviews. He’s an active member of the Bard Society, Florida’s longest-running writers’ workshop.
His novel and dozens of short stories, most of them richly-layered mysteries, take place in New England. Mike and his wife Jean live in Florida with their three sons.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
February 9, 2016
I received a free copy of this book from Goodreads.
I really enjoyed this book. A good murder suspense story, with a few twists and turns to keep the interest. It deserves more than 3 stars but doesn't quite make it to 4. Worth a read.
I really enjoyed this book. A good murder suspense story, with a few twists and turns to keep the interest. It deserves more than 3 stars but doesn't quite make it to 4. Worth a read.
January 9, 2016
Michael Walsh knows how the action in a good crime story draws strategically on the complex moral topography of its setting. Ocean Park, or Lynn, Mass., provides rich ground for the motives and defining characteristics of his villains, victims, hapless bystanders, and flawed, but inspiring, heroes.
Like Roland Merullo, a distant college and high-school classmate, he shows how a struggling post-industrial, blue-collar city on the humbler fringes of metro Boston, historically dominated by clannish white ethnics, can drive a gripping, sociologically astute, and morally redemptive plot as effectively as a country village, manorial estate, big city, or transnational network of strategically situated movers and shakers. Walsh’s disparately located characters converge in engrossing clashes of virtue and self-interest in Ocean Park, across both sides of the bright line of legal propriety, as do Merullo’s in their adjacent, down-at-the-heels, beachside city of Revere.
Walsh’s setting for this fascinating noir story is full of pride, resilience and denial about its frustrating stagnation. Almost every other place in metro Boston has vaulted to the front tiers of prosperity, chic and desirability. With the cohorts of decent folk and municipal boosters of the real Lynn fairly represented in the story, Ocean Park also showcases an impressive range of crime, self-dealing, and forms of unspeakable depravity that cross the ethnic and cultural boundaries of the city that has never seemed to launch its comeback.
The plot unfolds in layered worlds of relentless struggle -- to get ahead, stay even, or cut one’s losses -- because gentrification and development have bypassed Ocean Park. The techies, investors, and entrepreneurs, who have brought new vitality to the metro region, drive through and past the community with pity, scorn and incomprehension. In real time, Boston media and academia routinely bemoan the seemingly self-inflicted tragedies of Lynn.
Walsh show how survivors of the glorious industrial age, members of the depleted, deeply rooted, white ethnic communities, who once had labored for and then demographically dislodged Yankee industrialists, clutch shreds of a modest, but racially privileged claim on the American dream, even as it dissolves underfoot. In Walsh’s city, and perhaps in Lynn, the hangers-on are resigned opportunists. Or they ardently dream of a boon time after the next promised infrastructural miracle – a highway, a subway line extension, a community college, or fiber optics – which never comes about!
The new blood in town are refugees and immigrants from Southeast Asia and working class Latinos drawn by low-cost, tumble-down housing, seeking employment niches for their unschooled skills and their willingness to work hard in multiple and punishing low-wage jobs. Alongside those slogging their way to the American dream, others are fast-tracking their way to the good life through cagey scams and frank criminality.
Michael Walsh knows Ocean Park like the back of his hand and his avatar, detective Matt Conley, carries that native knowledge through the networks of the familiar old city and the new immigrant city with dour realism and pained cynicism. Conley is one of the few cops not on the take. His moodiness and cautiously oblique approach to his challenges, duties, and desires underscore his decency. They make him a reliable lens through which to unravel the knot of the refreshingly incongruous plotlines Walsh has given us. Conley serves as a dependable touchstone for readers’ assessment of the fascinating and well-drawn figures maneuvering in the struggling city – we are taken in by the same virtues and repelled by the same vices that mislead and enlighten Conley in his journey.
The social landscape in the story is as varied and densely interwoven as the one that has evolved within the stagnation of the true avatar of Ocean Park: Latino and Cambodian gangbangers (“the Hispanics,” and “the Asians” in local argot), amoral local cops, high-handed state cops, crime bosses, corrupt politicians, erotic adventurers, sexual predators, wholesome family men, spiritually enlightened holy figures, religious hustlers, and a host of innocent bystanders from the white-ethnic, African American, Latino, and Asian communities, trying in everyday life to make it or hold the line on their inevitable losses.
The physical landscape of the story, framed within a few square miles of a marshy urban coastline, participates culturally and emotionally in the ambiguous resolution of the morality tale. With quick economy Walsh evokes cinematically vivid spaces. Their dampness, the late-winter chill, occasional splashes of color amid a pervasive gloom, and their pungency affect the reader and the characters alike, with their unexpected or revelatory qualities.
Within and between scenes Walsh’s characters glide among a fascinating set of venues in the social landscape -- a blue-collar boat harbor in a tidal estuary abutting an auto junkyard, to pricy condos along a marina salvaged out of a battered industrial shoreline, a menacing biker bar in the hollowed out brick remnants of the global shoe industry, a posh enclave on a tree-covered peninsula at the end of a scenic causeway, to blocks of shingled, single-family homes abutting three-deckers and wood-frame tenements with cracked pavements, all perfumed by bus exhaust, and encircled by low shrub rows and chain-link fences.
The neighborhoods house the ethnic mix of the bigoted and bighearted in the chorus of every-persons at the periphery of the action. A Catholic parish church slated for cost-saving closure recurs as a reference space throughout the novel as the site of a murder, a thwarted abduction, an apparent miracle, a media circus, an inferno, fervent devotion, spiritual humility, and canny manipulation.
Despite the high velocity action, all the gloom, menace, and violence, this crime story is as much about love and familial devotion as it about the dark side. Walsh neither condemns nor celebrates his flawed figures. As vile as people can be, he unsentimentally shows most as more broken than evil, and nearly all are driven by a near frantic desire for love and acceptance.
As types Walsh’s characters might populate any hard-boiled crime story, but he brings out their local distinctiveness, and even in this apparent genre piece, he evokes the complexity of their feelings and conflicting motives, all shaped for better or worse by the mix of opportunities and impediments in this curious environment. He evokes a current of defensive white entitlement and the racial polarization often found in blue collar spaces on the ropes like Ocean Park, especially as non-white, marginalized newcomers occupy the crime niches and leave bodies and burned out buildings as the visible traces of a brisk underground economy.
But Walsh endows Ocean Park with a cosmopolitan, taken-for-granted, 21st century, aspirational post-racialism: the tough, ambitious DA, the estranged wife of Matt Conley, is running to oust the sitting Latino Congressmember; an all-American local white boy – a warrior of fortune recently returned home to manage the biker bar for a shady Latino businessman – has an elegant, worldly, alluring, brilliant, nurturing African American girl-friend, who is also a physician and available to stitch up wounds contracted in the bar below her boyfriend’s office; Matt Conley, at loose ends and struggling with a family tragedy and failing marriage, is partnered with a straight-arrow African American colleague, newly recruited from Florida to clean up the cops and the city, who brings a deeply caring wife and picture perfect early teenaged sons for a new life in the bone-chilling north. There’s even a dynamic white woman social worker who inexplicably speaks fluent, idiomatic Khmer.
Walsh has done some homework to evoke the inner working of the immigrant Cambodian community, a node in a global network spanning the US to Long Beach, Calif., and the Pacific to Southeast Asia. The gang rituals are savage and presented with clinically cold precision, including their manifest effects on the bodies and sprits of their victims. The leadership treats the teenage crew ruthlessly. It’s all outsider-looking-in stuff, as are the scenes in a prayer room in the tenement, and the ministrations of a group of older Cambodian women caretakers, “the aunties,” who keep the culture alive, feed the gangboys, and turn amazingly resourceful in climactic moments.
Walsh is obviously more at home in the precincts of the white world – with the wise-cracking, irreverent late-middle-aged parish priest, who knows his people and their needs and their confessed sins (he shares strategically), better than the slick, clerical functionary sent from Boston to close the superfluous property down. He freely improvises in creating the language and attitude of the returned mercenary with a heart of gold, and those of the feisty social worker, game for a night of sleuthing at a scary sex club in a warehouse district in Boston.
The story unfolds with a sense of menace, even in the quiet parts, which Walsh sustains through a series of climaxes, each with its own gut tightening build up, until the denouement, which leaves as much unexplained and implied or never-to-be resolved as much as it satisfies. Walsh paces his stories well and dribbles clues throughout the text in sleeper passages and asides which even alert readers may miss or be misled by. There are surprises in the story but nothing is gratuitous.
A trained journalist and a seasoned technical writer, Walsh brings a terse but evocative precision to his description of places, processes, and, in understated ways, of the effects and working of his figures’ passions and convictions. These passages are quite absorbing and leave the reader marveling at his ability to make a detailed elaboration of physical or procedural features of a scene so gripping. The deadpan and dynamic technical prose erupt unexpectedly in colorful imagery and sly, associative metaphor that will make a reader smile at the author’s exuberant command of language. Still the text is decorated with a number of distracting gilded lilies that the author should have felt confident pruning with no loss to the textures and nuance of his effective, deadpan prose.
Ocean Park is an impressive launch. We have two more Matt Conley books on Ocean Park ahead of us. It is exciting to see Walsh’s power as a writer pushing against the limits of genre and makes me wish to see him breakout to explore the magical realist and shapeshifting possibilities that his material offers him on ordinary people surviving epochal transitions in the deindustrialized periphery of a turbo-charged region of the global system.
Like Roland Merullo, a distant college and high-school classmate, he shows how a struggling post-industrial, blue-collar city on the humbler fringes of metro Boston, historically dominated by clannish white ethnics, can drive a gripping, sociologically astute, and morally redemptive plot as effectively as a country village, manorial estate, big city, or transnational network of strategically situated movers and shakers. Walsh’s disparately located characters converge in engrossing clashes of virtue and self-interest in Ocean Park, across both sides of the bright line of legal propriety, as do Merullo’s in their adjacent, down-at-the-heels, beachside city of Revere.
Walsh’s setting for this fascinating noir story is full of pride, resilience and denial about its frustrating stagnation. Almost every other place in metro Boston has vaulted to the front tiers of prosperity, chic and desirability. With the cohorts of decent folk and municipal boosters of the real Lynn fairly represented in the story, Ocean Park also showcases an impressive range of crime, self-dealing, and forms of unspeakable depravity that cross the ethnic and cultural boundaries of the city that has never seemed to launch its comeback.
The plot unfolds in layered worlds of relentless struggle -- to get ahead, stay even, or cut one’s losses -- because gentrification and development have bypassed Ocean Park. The techies, investors, and entrepreneurs, who have brought new vitality to the metro region, drive through and past the community with pity, scorn and incomprehension. In real time, Boston media and academia routinely bemoan the seemingly self-inflicted tragedies of Lynn.
Walsh show how survivors of the glorious industrial age, members of the depleted, deeply rooted, white ethnic communities, who once had labored for and then demographically dislodged Yankee industrialists, clutch shreds of a modest, but racially privileged claim on the American dream, even as it dissolves underfoot. In Walsh’s city, and perhaps in Lynn, the hangers-on are resigned opportunists. Or they ardently dream of a boon time after the next promised infrastructural miracle – a highway, a subway line extension, a community college, or fiber optics – which never comes about!
The new blood in town are refugees and immigrants from Southeast Asia and working class Latinos drawn by low-cost, tumble-down housing, seeking employment niches for their unschooled skills and their willingness to work hard in multiple and punishing low-wage jobs. Alongside those slogging their way to the American dream, others are fast-tracking their way to the good life through cagey scams and frank criminality.
Michael Walsh knows Ocean Park like the back of his hand and his avatar, detective Matt Conley, carries that native knowledge through the networks of the familiar old city and the new immigrant city with dour realism and pained cynicism. Conley is one of the few cops not on the take. His moodiness and cautiously oblique approach to his challenges, duties, and desires underscore his decency. They make him a reliable lens through which to unravel the knot of the refreshingly incongruous plotlines Walsh has given us. Conley serves as a dependable touchstone for readers’ assessment of the fascinating and well-drawn figures maneuvering in the struggling city – we are taken in by the same virtues and repelled by the same vices that mislead and enlighten Conley in his journey.
The social landscape in the story is as varied and densely interwoven as the one that has evolved within the stagnation of the true avatar of Ocean Park: Latino and Cambodian gangbangers (“the Hispanics,” and “the Asians” in local argot), amoral local cops, high-handed state cops, crime bosses, corrupt politicians, erotic adventurers, sexual predators, wholesome family men, spiritually enlightened holy figures, religious hustlers, and a host of innocent bystanders from the white-ethnic, African American, Latino, and Asian communities, trying in everyday life to make it or hold the line on their inevitable losses.
The physical landscape of the story, framed within a few square miles of a marshy urban coastline, participates culturally and emotionally in the ambiguous resolution of the morality tale. With quick economy Walsh evokes cinematically vivid spaces. Their dampness, the late-winter chill, occasional splashes of color amid a pervasive gloom, and their pungency affect the reader and the characters alike, with their unexpected or revelatory qualities.
Within and between scenes Walsh’s characters glide among a fascinating set of venues in the social landscape -- a blue-collar boat harbor in a tidal estuary abutting an auto junkyard, to pricy condos along a marina salvaged out of a battered industrial shoreline, a menacing biker bar in the hollowed out brick remnants of the global shoe industry, a posh enclave on a tree-covered peninsula at the end of a scenic causeway, to blocks of shingled, single-family homes abutting three-deckers and wood-frame tenements with cracked pavements, all perfumed by bus exhaust, and encircled by low shrub rows and chain-link fences.
The neighborhoods house the ethnic mix of the bigoted and bighearted in the chorus of every-persons at the periphery of the action. A Catholic parish church slated for cost-saving closure recurs as a reference space throughout the novel as the site of a murder, a thwarted abduction, an apparent miracle, a media circus, an inferno, fervent devotion, spiritual humility, and canny manipulation.
Despite the high velocity action, all the gloom, menace, and violence, this crime story is as much about love and familial devotion as it about the dark side. Walsh neither condemns nor celebrates his flawed figures. As vile as people can be, he unsentimentally shows most as more broken than evil, and nearly all are driven by a near frantic desire for love and acceptance.
As types Walsh’s characters might populate any hard-boiled crime story, but he brings out their local distinctiveness, and even in this apparent genre piece, he evokes the complexity of their feelings and conflicting motives, all shaped for better or worse by the mix of opportunities and impediments in this curious environment. He evokes a current of defensive white entitlement and the racial polarization often found in blue collar spaces on the ropes like Ocean Park, especially as non-white, marginalized newcomers occupy the crime niches and leave bodies and burned out buildings as the visible traces of a brisk underground economy.
But Walsh endows Ocean Park with a cosmopolitan, taken-for-granted, 21st century, aspirational post-racialism: the tough, ambitious DA, the estranged wife of Matt Conley, is running to oust the sitting Latino Congressmember; an all-American local white boy – a warrior of fortune recently returned home to manage the biker bar for a shady Latino businessman – has an elegant, worldly, alluring, brilliant, nurturing African American girl-friend, who is also a physician and available to stitch up wounds contracted in the bar below her boyfriend’s office; Matt Conley, at loose ends and struggling with a family tragedy and failing marriage, is partnered with a straight-arrow African American colleague, newly recruited from Florida to clean up the cops and the city, who brings a deeply caring wife and picture perfect early teenaged sons for a new life in the bone-chilling north. There’s even a dynamic white woman social worker who inexplicably speaks fluent, idiomatic Khmer.
Walsh has done some homework to evoke the inner working of the immigrant Cambodian community, a node in a global network spanning the US to Long Beach, Calif., and the Pacific to Southeast Asia. The gang rituals are savage and presented with clinically cold precision, including their manifest effects on the bodies and sprits of their victims. The leadership treats the teenage crew ruthlessly. It’s all outsider-looking-in stuff, as are the scenes in a prayer room in the tenement, and the ministrations of a group of older Cambodian women caretakers, “the aunties,” who keep the culture alive, feed the gangboys, and turn amazingly resourceful in climactic moments.
Walsh is obviously more at home in the precincts of the white world – with the wise-cracking, irreverent late-middle-aged parish priest, who knows his people and their needs and their confessed sins (he shares strategically), better than the slick, clerical functionary sent from Boston to close the superfluous property down. He freely improvises in creating the language and attitude of the returned mercenary with a heart of gold, and those of the feisty social worker, game for a night of sleuthing at a scary sex club in a warehouse district in Boston.
The story unfolds with a sense of menace, even in the quiet parts, which Walsh sustains through a series of climaxes, each with its own gut tightening build up, until the denouement, which leaves as much unexplained and implied or never-to-be resolved as much as it satisfies. Walsh paces his stories well and dribbles clues throughout the text in sleeper passages and asides which even alert readers may miss or be misled by. There are surprises in the story but nothing is gratuitous.
A trained journalist and a seasoned technical writer, Walsh brings a terse but evocative precision to his description of places, processes, and, in understated ways, of the effects and working of his figures’ passions and convictions. These passages are quite absorbing and leave the reader marveling at his ability to make a detailed elaboration of physical or procedural features of a scene so gripping. The deadpan and dynamic technical prose erupt unexpectedly in colorful imagery and sly, associative metaphor that will make a reader smile at the author’s exuberant command of language. Still the text is decorated with a number of distracting gilded lilies that the author should have felt confident pruning with no loss to the textures and nuance of his effective, deadpan prose.
Ocean Park is an impressive launch. We have two more Matt Conley books on Ocean Park ahead of us. It is exciting to see Walsh’s power as a writer pushing against the limits of genre and makes me wish to see him breakout to explore the magical realist and shapeshifting possibilities that his material offers him on ordinary people surviving epochal transitions in the deindustrialized periphery of a turbo-charged region of the global system.
June 10, 2017
I received a copy of this book through the Goodreads Giveaway program in exchange for an open and honest review. This was a fairly enjoyable book, great for people interested in the crime/mystery genre, however I found I just couldn't really get into it. I found that the characters could have been more developed (they started with rich storylines in the beginning but it seemed like Walsh got more plot-driven and less character-focused as the book moved on). It was a decent read, just not my favourite.
December 9, 2015
Detective Matt Conley in Ocean Park struggles with his failing marriage, betrayal, gang killings, hyman trafficking, "miracles"(?) of Madonna's bloody tears. Good Book from Good Reads!
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