Judson (The Violet Hour, 2009, etc.) is a thoroughly accomplished writer. Still, the plot is noticeably underdone. For...
A jittery shamus opts for a life without peeping but finds that the past won’t stay put.
Remer, once a big-time, big-city private eye who’s lost whatever first name he ever had, rethinks his vocation after a searing experience scares him silly, scars him permanently and generates intimations of mortality. Self-exiled from Manhattan, he plants roots in Southampton, where the nice little liquor store he owns helps him sleep better at night. In addition, he acquires lovely Angela, a girlfriend bred in the bone for sympathy, understanding and such undemanding sex that she too helps him sleep better at night. But Remer’s past catches up with him in the form of Mia Ferrara, the never-quite-renounced love of his life who’d left him flat, vanishing with $80,000 of hard-earned cash from his liquor business. Now, according to Mia’s mother, she’s disappeared again. Will Remer return to sleuthing long enough to track her down? If he’s successful, Mrs. Ferrara will pony up the stolen money. With some reluctance Remer signs on, mounts an investigation and, of course, finds himself back in the world he’d been at such pains to escape: chicanery, murder, generalized mayhem and, worst of all, possible betrayal. Is Remer being set up? And by Mia?
Judson (The Violet Hour, 2009, etc.) is a thoroughly accomplished writer. Still, the plot is noticeably underdone. For connoisseurs of style over substance.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-38361-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
A good one in the tough school, in which private detective Marlowe is hired to investigate a blackmailing and finds himself bucking a well-run gang, several murders, and the D A's office. Hard-boiled, fast paced, plenty of action, some sensationalism. Not for conservatives.
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 1938
ISBN: 0394758285
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1938
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Looks like Neal Carey, the peripatetic agent of that free- lance justice troop Friends of the Family, will never get back to New York to write his dissertation on Tobias Smollett. This time he's sprung from three years in a Chinese monastery (The Trail to Buddha's Mirror, 1992) only to be sent undercover as a ranch-hand in the Nevada plains to scout out the Sons of Seth, a white- supremacist flock that's his best hope for locating two-year-old Cody McCall, snatched from his Hollywood mother during a paternal weekend. Neal settles in deep, of course, and his ritual ordeals- -having to sell out the rancher who took him in, breaking off his romance with tough schoolmarm Karen Hawley, going up against rotten-apple Cal Strekker, getting ordered to kill his Friendly mentor Joe Graham—are as predictable as the trademark dose of mysticism as the bodies pile up, and as the certainty that when the dust settles, Neal won't be back at school. Winslow's Aryan crazies don't have the threatening solidity of Stephen Greenleaf's (Southern Cross, p. 1102 ), but Neal's latest adventure is full of entertaining derring-do.
Pub Date: Nov. 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09934-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1993
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