The Seventh Enemy

The Seventh Enemy is an interesting novel about the theatrical aspects of politics struggling to escape from a lackluster mystery story. The politics are those of gun control, and Brady Coyne is drawn into the debate when his childhood friend Walter Kinnick, scheduled to testify against a gun-control law pending in the Massachusetts legislature, unexpectedly endorses it instead. He and (by association) Brady land on the “enemies list” of an NRA-like organization, and bullets begin flying in their direction.

Local law-enforcement officers, implausibly, do little to investigate, and Brady is soon on the trail of the shooter. Suspects abound, but most of them have such spectacularly obvious motives that experienced mystery readers will show more instantly discount them, leaving the “least likely suspect” more obvious than Tapply probably intended. Brady’s investigation of the mystery thus feels a bit perfunctory, and the crowning revelation – which doesn’t solve it, so much as render it moot – equally so. The latest installment in Brady’s busy romantic life also has a by-the-numbers quality, though he’s more fun to read about at the beginning of a relationship (as here) than at the end.

What lifts The Seventh Enemy above all that is Tapply’s sharp, cynical portrait of the gun-control debate as an elaborate political dance in which legislators, lobbyists, and reporters all know – and, to their mutual benefit, facilitate – one another’s moves. The great gulf, he suggests, is not that dividing those who support gun control from those who oppose it, but that dividing the “true believers” on both sides from the pros who choreograph the dance and use it to further their own careers in the public eye. Tapply, interestingly, spares neither Walt Kinnick nor Brady from that critique, giving his hero pause to think about his handling of the case and the reader a novel more complex than it might first appear. show less

Brady is contacted by his former classmate Walter "Wally" Kinnick. Wally is speaking on gun control at the state legislature in Boston and has his visit has been funded by SAFE (Second Amendment For Ever). He decides to speak again assault guns and SAFE becomes upset. Wally's name is #1 on their enemy list and Brady becomes #7. Wally is shot at outside his cabin in Western MA while girlfriend Diana (and Brady) are in the cabin. Eventually Brady is shot too. It's not SAFE doing the shooting, but they are blamed. The @10 person (Wilson Bailey) whose wife & child were killed by an estranged husband killng his wife at a library was the one behind all this. He finally committed suicide.