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PICCOLO by James Baddock

PICCOLO

by James Baddock

Pub Date: July 1st, 1992
ISBN: 0-8027-1201-0
Publisher: Walker

Here, in Baddock's latest (Emerald, etc.), a yuppie police detective and pretty police sergeant roll up their sleeves to do battle with an evil multinational conglomerate—one that's trying to foist shoddy techno-goods on a too-trusting United Kingdom. Young, handsome, university educated, sadly divorced, BMW- driving, second-generation policeman and cleaned-up Yorkshireman Steven Redmond is shaken from his post-Thatcherian, career-oriented smugness by his latest assignment—a lukewarm directive to see whether there's any pattern to a recent string of accidents and suicides. Indeed there is. The departed were all techno-weenies who had had something to do with a supersecret military project that Steven isn't supposed to look at too closely. In fact, Steven isn't supposed to look at anything too closely. He has been selected for the job because of his shallow careerism. But our Steven is made of better stuff than his slick lifestyle would suggest, and with the assistance of his attractive, computer canny Detective Sergeant Gail Harper, he quickly uncovers multinational corporate foul play on the grandest of scales and involving the highest levels of government. Even when he's sent to the States to get him out of the way, Steven sticks to the job. Much blood flows. Many techies die. Gratuitously violent yet curiously dull—a pale imitation of an early-Sixties thriller.