1991 mystery, fourth in the Carlotta Carlyle series (neo-noir
private investigation). Carlotta runs into her old bandmate Dee
Willis, who's stayed in the music business and finally made it big.
But Dee's behaving weirdly even for her, and the past echoes into the
present.
There's blackmail here, and corruption both large and small; and
if you lie down with pigs, you're going to get muddy. Which is
something of a recurring theme of the series, really; Carlotta wants a
simple solution, with good guys victorious and bad guys punished, and
that's never what she gets.
And of course there always more complications. Here they include Dee's
tentative relationship with her new record company (she's worked hard
to get this far and they could drop her in an instant), and Carlotta's
ex-husband Cal who left her for Dee. And a friend's suicide years ago
that suddenly takes on a whole new level of significance.
What's relatively underplayed this time round is the recurring
characters; Paolina, Carlotta's adoptive "little sister", is almost
absent, and her bad-idea lover Sam Gianelli doesn't show up at all.
The new cast is interesting, and so's the new history, but the balance
is a bit off, even if it's attempting to compensate for the relatively
continuity-heavy Coyote.
I wouldn't jump into the series here, but it's a good one nonetheless.
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