Review: "Late Checkout" by Alan Orloff

Late Checkout by Alan Orloff Level Best Books, 2024     Late Checkout, the second Mess Hopkins mystery by Alan Orloff, is a laidback thriller with a solid mystery and just enough action to keep the pages turning. Mess operates his retired parents’ roadside motel, the Fairfax Manor Inn, on Route 50 in Fairfax, Viginia. The Inn is outdated and unprofitable—Mess will give anyone in need a room for a night, a week, or more without charging them a cent. Which is exactly what Mess does when his cousin, Finn, shows up on his doorstep.       Six years earlier, Finn had disappeared after arguing with his parents—Mess’s uncle and aunt—about being gay. It had been so long since anyone had heard from Finn, the family believed he was dead. So Mess gives his cousin a room and tries not crowd him with questions about where he was (and what he was doing) during all those lost years. But when Finn finally starts talking, he tells an unbelievable story about two men trying to kill him. Mess, skeptical but trying to be supportive, goes along with Finn’s crazy tale. But he soon realizes that, while Finn is being less than candid with him, there is some truth to what his cousin is saying. Mess enlists the help of his girlfriend, the newspaper reporter Lia Katsaros—who is waist-deep in the biggest story of her life about the murder of a local land developer—and his best friend Vell.       Late Checkout is a comfortable, thoughtful, and well-crafted thriller, with a dash of whodunit. The primary characters, Mess, Lia, and Vell, are likeable and believable. A handful of side characters are charmingly odd, including Mess’s Uncle Phil and the Inn’s manager, Fareed. The story is complicated—there is murder, politics, an assortment of family tensions and weirdness, and more than one false lead. The narrative builds slowly, with Finn annoyingly holding back and sometimes lying outright about what he knows, but it is never dull or uninteresting. And the solution is surprising, with enough clues in the narrative to make this reader wonder why he didn’t figure it sooner.

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