1993 mystery, thirteenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone, private
investigator in San Francisco.
At the end of the previous book, Sharon's lover Hy Ripinsky had
disappeared; now it's time to look into that. Meanwhile All Souls
Legal Cooperative has grown and got more formal, and the partners want
to push Sharon into a desk job.
That B plot is under-served, really: it's an excuse for some good
conversations with the long-term characters of the series, but it
feels like an excuse, an artificial setup that the people who know
Sharon wouldn't have tried to get her to agree to in the first place.
I suspect Muller may have felt the same way, as its eventual
resolution is given only in summarised report.
The investigation of Hy's disappearance is the main business, and it
soon comes to involve a dubious security firm, a kidnapping, and
illegal crossings of the border from Mexico. There are bad people
here, but this isn't one of those machine-smoothed plots orchestrated
by one villainous mastermind: rather, it's an example of how different
people's greed can interlock and cause worse situations than any of
them could have managed alone.
There's a flash-forward at the start of the book meant to create a
false sense of jeopardy; the text is repeated in its proper sequence
about half-way through, so I recommend skipping it the first time. The
US/Mexico border situation has clearly been researched in detail, and
for my taste a bit too much of that research was visible on the page,
but mostly the investigation keeps moving, and the details form a
background to the story rather than being major drivers for it; it's a
plot that could be transplanted to a different setting relatively
easily.
But by this stage in the series I'm coming back because I like the
people, and Sharon uses both the investigation and the work pressures
to voice some thoughts about how she wants her life to progress from
here on. That might not mean much if one started the series here, but
I've been following since the first one from 1977 (which I read five
years ago), and I feel that Sharon has grown and changed realistically
in that time.
Followed by Till the Butchers Cut Him Down.
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