1997 mystery, seventeenth in Muller's series about Sharon McCone,
private investigator in San Francisco. McCone's former flying
instructor asks her to look into her disappeared boyfriend… then dies
in a way that's surely not coincidental. And letting a client's death
go unavenged isn't in the Private Eye Code.
This is a pretty mixed book. Muller builds up a big mystery about
the missing boyfriend: why doesn't he seem to have a past?
Unfortunately every clue points in the same direction, and the most
obvious answer (ur jnf va jvgarff cebgrpgvba naq uvf cnfg unf pbzr
onpx gb unhag uvz) turns out to be the right one, which is always a
bit disappointing.
But more interesting is how McCone gets there, the gritty business
of investigation; that's been a strong point of these books for a
while, and I continue to appreciate this basically unglamorous but
effective look at how the job is done (even if computers, obviously
not being Muller's area of enthusiasm, are used largely to produce
answers by magic when all else has failed).
At the same time there's a decent amount of practical business about
flying (not much in the way of actual flying scenes, but plenty on how
the life of a small airfield works); I like Muller's model of inhaling
lots of information on a particular subject and then writing a book
set in and around it, and it works well again here. (I just wish the
crimes that are laid into the specialised subjects were a bit more
innovative.)
Once the big question was resolved, though, things dropped off for me;
the climactic scenes should have been filled with tension, but felt as
though all the important stuff had already happened off-stage and we
missed it. In particular, the final resolution is simply handed to
McCone because she was in the right place at the right time.
Still, the regular characters continue to acquire depth, the
partnership between Sharon and Hy mostly feels plausible as they come
to terms with trying to be good people even though they're very good
at, and enjoy, violence, and the whole thing is generally fun.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.