This is the most recent of Block’s Matthew Scudder novels. Matt is on
the wagon, married, and reasonably respectable. And after a gala evening
at the Mostly Mozart festival, Matt discovers that a pair of his fellow
Patrons of the Arts were murdered in a particularly gruesome way when
they returned home from the Lincoln Center. It’s really nothing to do
with him, but eventually he starts looking into it anyway.

And that’s the problem with this book–it’s really nothing to do with
Matt Scudder. It’s about the perpetrator, and Matt’s just a foil. Block
would have done better to rewrite this without Matt Scudder at all.