Then the story dips into deep-snoop dialogue and takes off for Hammett heaven. Slow start turns into a great grabber.
Sequel to Tramble’s debut, The Dying Ground (2001), continuing the story of Maceo Redfield.
In 1989, Maceo, a failed baseball powerhouse in Oakland, California, investigated the murder of his childhood best friend, Billy Crane, turned successful drug dealer. Billy’s girlfriend Felicia Bennett had been Maceo’s true love but went missing when she was the only witness to Billy’s murder. Meanwhile, Tramble deals vividly with Oakland’s spreading crack cocaine epidemic. It’s now two years later and Maceo, 25 and facially scarred, returns from the freedom of having been on the road and his own master. First off, even before going to see his beloved Granddaddy, he hits his old barbershop, ever the CNN news center of Oakland’s African-Americans, and learns that his friend Cornelius “Cotton” Knox (with whom he and Billy Crane were raised by Granddaddy and who’s now star of the Anaheim Vanguard basketball team) is being hounded about a nameless woman “bludgeoned” to death (actually, her throat was slit) in a San Francisco hotel room registered to him. But Maceo senses that his other childhood friend, Jonathan Holly Ford, is being set up to take the fall for Cotton. Well-heeled Cotton is married to Allaina, dramatically beautiful in diamond necklace, big engagement rock, and blinding white suit open to the navel. “That is not the wife of a poor man,” says Maceo’s barber, seeing her on TV. With Billy’s death, Holly has inherited Oakland’s drugbiz and was seen with Cotton while they argued with two thugs in the lobby of the San Francisco hotel, apparently about the dead girl. In Berkeley, for no reason he knows, someone saps Maceo in a parking lot. He goes out to see Cotton at his fortress in Timber Hills, where he rescues the gorgeous Sonny Boston, double-talking friend of the dead girl (and a regular Brigid O’Shaughnessy), and takes her to his pad.
Then the story dips into deep-snoop dialogue and takes off for Hammett heaven. Slow start turns into a great grabber.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-75882-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
Of the three intertwined plots, the Francoeur scheme is the deadliest, and the Ouellet saga will remind readers of the...
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec is pushed toward retirement.
It’s a great relief for Inspector Gamache to get out of the office and head for Three Pines to help therapist-turned-bookseller Myrna find out why her friend Constance Pineault didn’t turn up for Christmas. Except for Isabelle Lacoste, Gamache’s staff has been gutted by Chief Superintendent Francoeur. Gamache’s decisions have been mostly ignored and bets placed on how soon he’ll admit redundancy and retire. Even worse, a recent tragedy (The Beautiful Mystery, 2012, etc.) has led his second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, to transfer out of Gamache’s department, fall sway to prescription drugs and hold his former boss in contempt. En route to Three Pines, Gamache happens upon a fatality at the Champlain Bridge and agrees to handle the details. But this case takes a back seat to the disappearance of Constance when she turns up dead in her home. Myrna confides Constance’s secret: As the last surviving Ouellet quintuplet, she’d spent her adult years craving privacy after the national publicity surrounding the birth of the five sisters had turned them into daily newspaper fodder. Why would anyone want to murder this reclusive woman of 79? The answer is developed through clues worthy of Agatha Christie that Gamache interprets while dealing with the dismemberment of his homicide department by Francoeur, who’s been plotting a major insult to Canadian government for 30 years. Matters come to a head when Gamache and the one Sûreté chief still loyal to him and her husband, a computer whiz, are tracked to Three Pines, where Beauvoir awaits, gun in hand.
Of the three intertwined plots, the Francoeur scheme is the deadliest, and the Ouellet saga will remind readers of the real-life Dionne family debacle of the 1940s. But it’s Three Pines, with its quirky tenants, resident duck and luminous insights into trust and friendship, that will hook readers and keep them hooked.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-65547-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
The relaxed and reigning king of beach music, who most recently told Tales From Margaritaville (1989), tries his hand at a relaxed and rambling novel. It's about seaplanes, a pretty girl, a vanished rock star, the curse of jet skis, a magic scepter, disrupters of paradise, and conch burgers. Joe Merchant, of the title, is the missing, presumed dead rock star whose sister Trevor Kane has returned to Florida to enlist her old lover Frank Bama to check out rumors of Merchant's survival. Trevor left Frank, a Vietnam vet who would rather fly than get serious, years ago because he seemed to love his ancient seaplane more than he loved her. Frank's doughty seaplane, however, is just what she needs to go in search of someone named Desdemona, who might be somewhere in the Caribbean. There is a Desdemona, and she does have a psychic link to the missing musician. She's been getting extrasensory messages for months. Also on the trail of Mr. Merchant and Desdemona are trash journalist Rudy Breno and one- armed, archvillainous soldier-of-fortune Colonel Cairo. Colonel Cairo is obsessed with the restoration of his missing arm, a task requiring a missing crystal. Desdemona might know something about that. The searches are Florida-intense, which is to say that there is plenty of time for subplots about Frank's chum who has been blowing up the jet skis that make paradise too noisy, and about a coldblooded killer with eyeballs tattooed on his eyelids who's not, after all, a subplot. So laid-back and rambling it's perilously close to sloppy, but Buffett's considerable charms as a performer and goof-off artist keep things afloat. The uninitiated may be baffled; his fans will be enchanted.
Pub Date: Aug. 10, 1992
ISBN: 0-15-196296-0
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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