Penzler Pick, November 2001: William Tapply's Brady Coyne novels have long delivered meticulous plots and a strong moral sense, and Past Tense, the series' 18th entry, lives up to that solid standard. (Having for a time been Tapply's publisher, I speak both as a fan and as one familiar with his professionalism.) Coyne, a Boston attorney in private practice with a penchant for good-Samaritan trouble-shooting, is one of those mystery heroes in whom decency is perhaps the paramount characteristic. Liked equally by men and women, Brady usually manages to keep a level head when bad things start to happen, but always in a believable way. He sometimes gets things wrong, but that's okay because he'll usually find a way to sort them out. A steady intelligence is always present, and the reader increasingly appreciates the carefulness with which his creator regards the human condition: the relationships between men and women, parents and children, workers and their colleagues, the guilty and the innocent. Betrayal, above all, is something he seems to have made a special area of study. Past Tense opens as Brady and his current lady friend, Evie Banyon, are headed off to a Cape Cod rental for a long weekend's getaway. At a local seafood shanty, after a satisfying lobster feast, their idyll suddenly is shattered by an intrusion from Evie's past. Even after she has hauled off and slapped the insolent stranger staring at her from the bar (a man