Murder in Bombay—in an enjoyable if strained entry in the serial-killer/travelogue subgenre pioneered by Martin Smith in Gorky Park and highlighted by William Bayer's Jerusalem-set Pattern Crimes and Joseph Koenig's Tehran-based Brides of Blood. ``Anything—absolutely anything—can happen in India,'' says hero-cop George Sansi, and as presented by Mann (The Traitor's Contract, 1990), anything—and nearly everything—does, beginning with the discovery at Film City, India's Hollywood, of a horribly savaged body. Sansi—an appealingly saturnine character who's perhaps the only blue-eyed Indian walking the subcontinent (courtesy of the British general who sired him)—pursues the case with his usual moral diligence, stepping on powerful toes as he links the body to a gay prostitution ring serving film bigwigs. The Special Branch inspector is pulled into a second case as well, trying to stop a war between rival Bombay gangsters, a subplot that points up the novel's major strength and weakness: Mann's crackling depiction of India as a madhouse where the only real law is that of survival (most forcefully displayed during Sansi's visit to Dharavai, Bombay's fetid slum-suburb); and the author's forced striving for eccentrically interesting incidents and characters (as seen in the gangster Paul Kapoor, who talks in 50's slang and worships Elvis). Sansi can't stop Kapoor from slaying his rival, but, after a second mutilated body surfaces, the cop does trace the killings back to a 50-year-old murder spree—and to that long-ago killer's grandson, living in London, where the novel attenuates into a dull tracking of the culprit by Sansi, followed by a Bombay- set finale that seems stapled on. Fast-moving and fascinating for its exotic lore, but you can hear Mann's mechanics clanking away. Still, the engagingly earnest Sansi and his amazing India deserve a sequel.
Pub Date: June 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-449-90768-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
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