Stab in the Bach:
A Pat Riordan mystery

by Roy Gilligan
reviewed by Frances Rossi

In this last of his Pat Riordan series, Roy Gilligan is true to his classic whodunit style. In Stab in the Bach, Carmel private eye Pat Riordan, coached by this associate/girl friend Reiko, resolves the mysterious deaths of a critic, a conductor and two violinists--all involved in Carmel's Bach Festival.

The setting is unabashedly the Monterey Peninsula. You can walk past Pat Riordan's office on Alvarado Street or visit his haunts on the oak-shaded lanes of Carmel, where most of the story takes place. Gilligan makes no effort to obscure locations. Such a vivid sense of place, along with the familiar Bach Festival setting, make the reader feel the story could really have happened.

But there is a sadly prophetic note in the story, that makes it ring even more true. One of his characters dies because his pace-maker fails. One has the sense Pat Riordan spoke for his creator, Gilligan, when he said, "The one thing I have feared in my life, aside from a bunch of North Koreans and Red Chinese, is a heart attack. There's no history in my family that I know of. But I've lost a few close friends. And I ain't as young as I used to be." The book came out in 1996.

And now we've lost Roy Gilligan. Roy Gilligan died August 6, 2004, of a heart attack.

Margot Petit Nichols, in her Pine Cone article of September 17, 2004, quotes Gilligan as saying, "Pat Riordan is me. I just turn him loose and he figures things out on his own."

Other books by Roy Gilligan include:
Chinese Restaurants Never Serve Breakfast, Live Oaks Also Die, Poets Never Kill, Happiness is Often Deadly, Playing God...and Other Games, Just Another Murder in Miami, and Dead Heat from Big Sur.