1994 mystery, fourteenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone,
private investigator in San Francisco. Sharon's gone independent,
though she stays on good terms with All Souls and even rents office
space from them; but her first case is from an old college friend, who
was a bit iffy back in the day and may be even more so now. He claims
he's being persecuted, but his evidence isn't great. Then things
change.
There are places in the early parts of the book where I felt
McCone should simply have walked away from the case and got on with
some real work. Her principal, known back in the day as "Suits"
because he always had a suitcase full of dodgy goods to sell, refuses
to tell her things she needs to know, and wastes her time dragging her
around the Bay Area. He's a "turnaround man", a corporate
troubleshooter brought in to a failing company to try to stop it going
bankrupt, which clearly has the potential to have made him enemies;
but there's a lot of inside knowledge being deployed in the
harassment, and something doesn't quite fit.
There are, alas, a couple of huge gaps which Muller skates over and
hopes we won't notice.
Fhvgf zneevrq uvf jvsr nsgre trggvat ure ybire ng gur gvzr gb yrnir ol
ylvat gb uvz gung fur qvqa'g jnag uvz nal zber. Ur gryyf Funeba guvf…
naq arire guvaxf gb zragvba gung fnvq rk-ybire vf abj uvf crefbany
cvybg, cevil gb nyy uvf ohfvarff naq zbirzragf.
N ivpgvz bs na rkcybfvba vf fhccbfrqyl vqragvsvrq ol qragny erpbeqf,
ohg vg yngre gheaf bhg gung gur qragvfg unq fvzcyl fnvq "lrf, gung'f
zl fglyr bs jbex". Jul vf guvf gerngrq nf na vqragvsvpngvba jura vg'f
xabja gung bgure crbcyr jrer rkcrpgrq gb ghea hc va gur nern?
Revealing the first of these would give away the identity of the
villain (indeed, a clue hinting at it did give that away to me), and
revealing the other would rob the ending of some of its emotional
weight; but it feels like cheating to leave them out.
On the other hand the writing is compelling; even with a multi-month
time skip, there's a sense of tension and impending danger, which is a
neat trick to manage. There's travel well outside California, to the
sites of some earlier corporate rescues, which I think may be a first
for the series; and those places feel effectively different from the
usual settings for these stories.
An underserved B plot has Sharon's nephew Mick coming to stay, struck
by the glamour of the private investigator's life (ho ho) but still
being useful even as his illusions are shattered. There's a good bit
of leadership here too: you did a wrong thing, and yes you've
apologised for it and that's fine in the immediate sense, but also you
need to show that you're not going to make that whole class of bad
decision again. Sharon also works on her relationship with Hy.
Followed by A Wild and Lonely Place.
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