In Bad Faith by Geoff Carter
'In Bad Faith' by Geoff Carter
Milwaukee writer Geoff Carter returns with his third novel, In Bad Faith. Like his previous efforts, it’s a thriller. The P.S. Wars: Last Stand at Custer High (2018) concerns a teacher battling a for-profit takeover of his school; Thicker Than Water (2020) is an eco-thriller about two brothers battling over the fate of their inheritance—a vast tract of pristine Wisconsin Northwoods forest.
With In Bad Faith, Carter turns to detective fiction with a Chicago private eye, Nelson West, who slides into a tar pit of corporate intrigue. He thought it would be an interesting challenge to construct a detective novel and he loves the genre’s diverse perspectives.
“You have everything from Raymond Chandler to James Ellroy to Agatha Christie to Louise Penney,” he explains. “In a broader sense, a detective working to solve a mystery is analogous to creating order from chaos. Some writers, like Agatha Christie, convey a sensibility which makes creating order from chaos possible, even inevitable. Other writers, like Ellroy or Chandler, construct a world vision in which complete order—or justice—is difficult, if not impossible. Good and evil are transposed and sometimes superimposed in their works. In Bad Faith attempts to strike a balance between the two visions, seeking to attain a measure of justice in an ever-changing and unpredictable world.”
True to classic models, Carter delivers his story with punchy sentences and quick back-and-forth dialogue. “I had the image of the wise-cracking hardboiled detective in mind, and—weirdly, his dialogue kept coming to me in the rhythms and cadences of a Humphrey Bogart voice. I really like Elmore Leonard’s clarity and brevity of style and worked to attain that sort of clean style into my own writing.”
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Why choose Chicago as the jump-off point for a story that winds through the drug cartels of Mexico? “When my daughter was going to school in Chicago, I got to know the city and grew to love its energy, the grittiness of its history, the people, the elegance of its architecture and the diversity of its neighborhoods,” he says. “As a writer, I had almost an endless number of locales to choose from for setting my scenes.”
Carter will do a short talk and reading 7 p.m. Thursday, June 27 at the Art Bar, 722 E. Burleigh St. A reception will follow immediately afterwards.
Buy In Bad Faith on Amazon here.
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