1984 mystery; fifth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private
investigator in San Francisco. A major player in the flea-markets
wants help dealing with a stalker, but his business is not as honest
as it could be, and soon people start turning up dead.
As with Muller's other books so far, this one's short and sharp,
without the padding that would be needed to bring it up to "airplane
book" size. The major problematic element is that Willie, the client,
is an unashamed dealer in stolen goods; Sharon's boss has a past
connection with him, but Sharon has to be intrigued into seeing him as
a good guy who deserves to be helped. She gets over that quite easily,
and if you can't join her, at least building a mental model of the
fence as put-upon businessman rather than as facilitator of predation
on people and organisations, you're likely to have trouble with the
plot.
Sharon continues to be an interesting narrator; she's competent, but
definitely not perfect, and her reasons for discomfort when her
boyfriend seems likely to get a job involving living closer to her
ring true. She complains, in narration, that he hasn't been
sympathetic about her horrible day – and immediately goes on to say
what I was thinking, which is that that's because she's refused to
tell him about it.
She does a decent job of solving the mystery, too, coming to the right
conclusions in spite of a mass of confusing and contradictory
evidence. It's always good to see this approach, drowning the reader
in information rather than giving out single clues here and there; any
of the suspects might have been responsible for the various acts
under investigation, and perhaps there's not quite enough emotional
appeal to finding the right one rather than doing something horrid
to all of them, but it all still held together and retained my
attention.
As well as the material on the flea-markets, there's an interesting
early look at what would become paintball (in its incarnation as the
National Survival Game), though as Muller has done before this oddity
is readily dismissed as something fit only for weirdoes, in this case
right-wing nutters. Even so, she manages to avoid the big info-dumps
that have sometimes shown up in earlier books.
Followed by Double.
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