First in a series narrated by America's seminal PI novelists Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Erle Stanley Gardner, this is a sentimental journey through the watering holes and fleshpots of California when the authors worked as screenwriters in the '30s, living high and worrying about selling out to the studios. Hammett is the central character here, spinning a first-person yarn about a missing jewelled skull that closely resembles the inspiration for his classic, The Maltese Falcon. The exotic treasure causes a slew of greed-inspired murders, starting with the mysterious slaying of movie siren Sylvia Vane. She turns out to have been the secret wife of the aforementioned writing trio's editor at the legendary Black Mask magazine and the mother of a girl who could be in danger from gambling kingpins. The tangled tale successfully blends real characters with a fictional plot, good scholarship, and elegant writing, particularly when Gardner and Hammett chase a false lead in Frisco's Chinatown, running across a verbose Tong who gives them a contact's name and says to Hammett, ``Have your friend tell him that when the lotus is in bloom the soul stirs in joy.'' Nolan's (Hammett: A Life at the Edge, 1983, etc.) textured novel often creates that blissful effect.
Pub Date: July 22, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-10942-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1994
A promising start, but McMahon could do more with less.
Southern gothic mingles with modern noir in this well-intentioned mashup.
P.T. Marsh, a sergeant in the Mason Falls, Georgia, police department, has lost his way. After the deaths of his wife and son he has fallen into depression, drinking his way through his days, no longer Mason Falls’ best detective. Late one night he tries to help Crimson, a strip club performer, whose partner, Virgil Rowe, abuses her, but he soon finds himself in more complicated trouble. He beats and threatens Rowe, goes home, and wakes up to find Rowe has been murdered. Has Marsh killed him? He doesn’t know, but things get really sticky when Rowe becomes the most likely suspect in another murder that had taken place earlier that evening. The victim in that earlier death was a black teenager who was tortured and lynched. Following up on the racist murder leads Marsh to a white supremacist group and then further into history, revealing a pattern of deaths that reach back to the “old” South and exposing a shadowy cabal still in operation today. Historic documents contain the names of families still powerful in Georgia and hint at horrifying rituals. Marsh, who believes he can genuinely number himself among the unprejudiced white people—he has an African-American partner and his wife was also African-American—becomes again a "good detective" in opposing this powerful form of racism. Marsh is a likable character, but he has too much to do here: solve Rowe's murder to exonerate himself; rehabilitate himself and his reputation on the force; and expose and then fight the cabal. And while the persistence of racism is undeniable, the shape it takes in this novel is so sensationalized it may distract from the more pedestrian and pressing forms that are always around us.
A promising start, but McMahon could do more with less.Pub Date: March 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-53553-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This first installment of a new trilogy for Louise and the Special Search Staff is perhaps the most tightly knit of...
Taking charge of Copenhagen’s Special Search Agency, detective Louise Rick (Farewell to Freedom, 2012, etc.) catches the case of a young woman who’s been found dead more than 30 years after her death certificate was issued.
Responding to a public announcement, Agnete Eskildsen, a former care assistant at the Eliselund facility for the mentally disabled, identifies the distinctively scarred woman who recently took a fatal fall as Lisemette, who was one of the young patients at Eliselund a generation ago. The complication is that Lisemette turns out to be two people, Lise Andersen and her twin sister, Mette, and that they were both pronounced dead at age 17 on the same day back in 1980. Louise’s recent corpse is clearly Lise, but how can she have been alive (and having sex) until very recently—and what’s become of Mette, whom the Special Search Agency no longer has any reason to assume is actually dead? Ragner Rønholt, Louise’s new boss, wants her to mark the case closed now that she’s identified the dead woman, and you can see why. The murder of child care provider Karin Lund has reopened the search for a rapist who may have been preying on women in the neighborhood of Hvalsø ever since 23-year-old Lotte Svendsen went missing in 1991. But Louise, egged on by both her new colleague Eik Nordstrøm and her old friend Camilla Lind, keeps dogging the surviving staff at Eliselund until she uncovers long-buried secrets as ugly as you could wish.
This first installment of a new trilogy for Louise and the Special Search Staff is perhaps the most tightly knit of Blaedel’s grim procedurals.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4555-8152-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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