STARRED Book Review: Blood and Mascara

Reviewed by Erin Britton

Infidelity, corruption, and murder on the mean streets of Washington, DC.

A hard-boiled detective story set in the late 1990s but with more than a hint of classic noir like The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon, Colin Krainin’s Blood and Mascara traverses the seamier side of Washington, DC and exposes all the blood, gore, and corruption to be found there. 

Through pitch-perfect PI dialogue and a plot packed with political duplicity, sleaze, and casual violence, Krainin presents a fiendish murder mystery that shines a light on both the best and worst of humanity.

Former investigative journalist Bronze Goldberg is now a private eye who makes his living from seedy cases. Still, even those ‘tecs operating at the lower end of mediocre sometimes find that interesting cases come their way. “Bronze didn’t care much about the story of the dead congressman until he saw the guy’s picture and realized he was looking at either the second or the third man he’d seen balling Carolyn Haake two nights before.” It’s enough to distract him from his plan to start meditating.

Sufficiently shaken to take a modicum of action, Bronze reluctantly hits the streets to find out more about what happened to Billy Kopes, the “congressman who washed up on the banks of the Potomac.” First, reporter and former flame Esther McNamara provides background info on Kopes and then Bronze’s main contact in Metro PD, Detective Mark Roth, provides the more gory details. Of course, neither of them knows that he’d been “sitting all night in a tree taking pictures of Carolyn Haake’s active social life amounted to,” including seeing the “congressman’s erect uncircumcised penis on a collision course with Roger Haake’s wife.”

Given that Roger Haake, a political consultant, is “one of the most powerful unelected men in DC,” only someone incredibly brave or exceptionally foolish would consider having an affair with his wife. So which one was Kopes? And how much did Haake really know before he hired Bronze to tail Carolyn and find proof of her infidelity? 

Unfortunately, in addition to being downright despicable, Haake is murdered before Bronze can find out more from him, which makes for two bodies dropping in less than 24 hours. Clearly, something is seriously amiss.

Caught in the crosshairs both literally and metaphorically, Bronze knows that he’s stumbled into some serious—and very possible deadly—trouble. “The reality of the situation suddenly hit. Bronze’s heart began to race wildly. The old wound between his hip and groin began to throb and his mind flew back nine years.” Can he avoid the assassin’s bullets for long enough to get to the bottom of this dangerous business? And perhaps equally dangerous, why is his landlady, romance novelist and incorrigible curtain twitcher Iris Margaryan, also keeping a close eye on him? Could the past be coming back to haunt him?

While Blood and Mascara opens with news of Congressman Kopes’s death, rather than launching Bronze headfirst into an action-packed investigation, the story actually gets off to a surprisingly slow start. However, despite the lack of thrills and spills in the early chapters, Krainin manages to build both interest and tension by having Bronze initially take a leisurely pace toward his enquiries. Through the process of hitting up old contacts such as Esther and Roth for information, Bronze’s backstory is teased out, including hints as to what brought his journalistic career to an ignominious end.

Krainin does a great job from the outset of establishing Bronze as a man who is practically sleepwalking through his life, so much as that he is almost estranged from his reality and unaware of what his purpose in life is: “Had he really been married once, going to dinner parties where the men wore tweed jackets and brightly colored ties, got sloshed, and made out with the wrong wives in laundry rooms?”

He’s a recovering or recovered alcoholic, depending on how you look at it, although he can’t quite bring himself to fully complete all 12 Steps. The drinking is linked to his downfall as a journalist, but he has also left a trail of destruction in his romantic life too. The fact that he betrayed Esther is clear from the outset, as is the complexity of his feelings regarding Iris. “Iris. The landlady. More than that. Surely Bronze was in love with her by now. But what did that amount to?” As is the case for all the best gumshoes, his private and professional lives are likely to collide, leading to dramatic consequences. 

Luckily, despite being such a deeply flawed human being, Bronze is actually a top-notch private investigator, likely due to a combination of his journalistic training and his plain orneriness. And given the twisted, complicated murder mystery that Krainin has crafted for him to solve, he’s going to need all his skill and experience to stay alive long enough to discover who is trying to kill him. The answer to the puzzle is wrapped up in layers of sleaze, scandal, and corruption, and Bronze has to survive through a fair bit of bloody violence as he attempts to unravel the Kopes/Haake conundrum.

Much of Blood and Mascara is narrated in the third-person to provide an overview of Bronze’s thoughts on these matters—and the numerous other difficulties that come his way during the course of the investigation—showcasing his world-weary attitude and cynical perspective on life. In this way, Krainin draws out Bronze’s history and elucidates how he views and relates to those he encounters—both for the good and the bad. Given that Bronze doesn’t trust himself most of the time, it’s always questionable just how reliable of a narrator he is, which keeps things interesting and enhances the mystery.

Other chapters are narrated in the first-person by Iris as she muses on her feelings for and about Bronze and otherwise goes about her business as a journeywoman romance novelist. These parts of Blood and Mascara are more ponderous and metaphysical than Bronze’s chapters, sometimes slowing the pace a bit too much and seemingly detracting from the crime aspects of the story. However, the thread that Iris draws out throughout the story is an important and insightful one, and paying sufficient attention to her parts of the story helps make everything clearer.

The third main narrator is Detective Roth, returning to a third-person perspective, whose character Bronze is initially pretty disparaging about: “the hidden wheels of Roth’s brain smoothly ticking away in perfect rhythm behind that protective veil of good-humored, know-nothing masculinity.” That’s really just Bronze’s own prejudices and insecurities talking though, as Roth helps him out when many others wouldn’t and runs down some useful leads about the assassin. Moreover, Roth’s chapters have the form and tone of a police procedural, highlighting the methodical and non-glamorous nature of detective work, adding a point of difference to the typical PI story and creating additional interesting avenues for Krainin to lead readers down during the quest for justice.

An old-school detective novel with modern sensibilities and a healthy dose of nastiness, Blood and Mascara pairs an engagingly flawed PI with an eclectic supporting cast and pits them against both a complex plot and a host of nefarious villains. As Bronze seeks the truth behind the deaths of Kopes and Haake, there is plenty of filth to be sifted through and numerous secrets to be revealed—to say nothing of all the red herrings to be avoided—making for a thrilling whodunit.

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