The Man on the Bench
A Callie McFee Mystery #3
by Hy Conrad

My rating: 3 / 5
Genre: Mystery

Reporter Callie McFee enjoys the part of her day that involves stopping at a certain bench and talking to a homeless man named Barney, who is always sympathetic and a good listener. When Barney turns up dead, Callie is surprised to learn that there was more to her bench buddy than she knew. And as her brother, a homicide detective, investigates, she can’t help but get involved herself.

At its core, this is an overall decent cozy, procedural-type mystery. The premise of the murdered homeless man that more people than Callie might have been spilling secrets to is a great starting point. The book takes place in Austin, and though I’ve never been to that city, I have done research, watched videos, and done virtual visits for my job years ago, so the descriptions of the area were just detailed enough for me to be able to imagine myself there. Callie struggles with overindulgence of alcohol, though I’m not sure if she’s a functional alcoholic or just lacks self control? I can’t say I really connected with her attempts to get control of her drinking, but even aside from this, I overall felt like I couldn’t get much of a handle on her personality in general. She just felt fairly flat to me, for the most part. Partway through the book I realized I wasn’t really engaged, though I did at least have an interest in seeing how the mystery played out.

Then the mystery took a turn that was way too familiar to me, and I pegged the outcome a mile away. This is, unfortunately, due to having seen the same thing done in an episode of Monk, a TV show that I have watched many times and that the author worked on. Fortunately, only part of the mystery is solved by this thread, but unfortunately, major hints are dropped in the last quarter that just breeze right on by Callie. They’re so obvious, I can’t think of her as a competent amateur detective any longer. By the time some random detail makes it all click in her head (a random detail that is practically shoved in her/our faces), I was practically shouting at her to not be so thick.

This is the third book in a series, and though there are references to events from previous books, I didn’t feel like I missed out on a whole lot by starting right here. There’s one possible exception to that, though—Callie’s apparently super powerful father was a point of confusion to me through most of the book. We’re told he’d been the attorney general of Texas at one point, but he no longer is; I don’t know what he is/does now, so his role in this book mostly just confused me. But maybe that was something that was explained better in a previous book. Overall, the book was a decent read, but I don’t know if I enjoyed it enough to want to read more Callie McFee mysteries. I do think that others who enjoy this type of mystery story might like the book more than I did (and if you don’t know Monk as well as I do, you probably won’t peg at least the one part of the mystery like I did). Other reviews for this book, so far, are all 4 and 5 stars, so please check them out at the link below if you’re interested.

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