Esther Breslau is a Jewish immigrant who has found a job working as a photographer in the graft-filled world of 1895 Manhattan. John Tonnerman is an honest cop, a rare commodity on a police-force filled with those on the take and in a city where your innocence depends on the size of your pocketbook. Esther takes a picture during a riot and the thugs notice and come after her. A reporter she has been working with has the plates but the thugs worry about what he knows and take matters into their own hands to silence him forever. John and Esther try to figure it all out.
What I Liked
The research was impeccable, and the epilogue is a nice touch to separate fact from fiction. The writing is first-rate and the settings are alive with the time. Each image portrays the world of the time, and the reader is transported easily with each page.
What I Didn’t Like
A couple of small nit-picky points — there are a lot of characters, which can be a problem to track in mystery stories, but they are sufficiently different here that they don’t run together as much. A few of the characters (such as the reporter) were fleshed out a little TOO much, but I’m assuming part of that was with a view to them showing up in future stories too.
Amelia Pearce has a normal enough life, but with a soon-to-be ex-lover, she heads home to her parent’s house to heal her ego and ease the transition. However, she finds her life shattered by the truth about her father — he is not a simple journalist, but an operative for “The Network”, an ultra-secret organization of operatives on loan from the major intelligence agencies of the various countries with one goal: combat terrorism. It’s like James Bond and his counterparts working for Interpol, with only one person knowing all the agents. The father is killed by an assassin, as is Amelia’s mother, but Amelia manages to escape and starts using all the skills her father taught her as a child (through a long-running series of “survival” games).
What I Liked
The book was written by Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran, two of my favourite authors whether they use their own names or the “Dev Stryker” nom-de-plume. So, the style, the dialogue, the plot tools…all are superb, but I’m a little biased. This book is also unique in the field — the main character (Amelia) doesn’t even make an appearance until several chapters into the book. And seemingly-major characters keep getting killed off! There are not a whole lot of people left by the end of the book, so it becomes somewhat easier to follow. And killing off major characters does keep the reader guessing all the way through.
What I Didn’t Like
The bad guys are mostly one-dimensional except for the assassin, with the plot revolving around plans for Libyan terrorists to poison the water supply of America. And Amelia has the added problem that she can’t seem to trust anyone, even the head of the Network. Yet as much as I liked the writing, and as much as I liked the plot twists with the death of major characters, it made it very hard to care about some of the characters — why bother if they are killed off halfway through the book? As I said above, Amelia is the main character but doesn’t appear until several chapters into the book. Her father seemed to be the main character for the first few chapters, and then he dies. Four other key characters bite the dust before the end of the book too, nicely spread out through the book so you lose a character every couple of chapters. Too bad if you care about one…but after the first two check out, it’s hard to keep your interest.
After the death of the father, you find out that Amelia isn’t quite the helpless person she is initially portrayed as, because her father taught her survival skills — and yet she never wondered about her father? She always wrote him off as a small CIA bureaucrat or journalist, yet in the next breath talks about him with almost superhuman qualities? The collaboration between Murphy and Cochran is usually excellent — in this book, it reads more like they disagreed about the characters and maybe wrote chapters on their own. Kind of like the classic writing game where one person writes one chapter with twists and turns, and then asks the next person to pull the next chapter together, mesh the various elements, and give their own spin to it.
A body is found with the letter “P” carved into its forehead. P stands for pawn, and it is dumped in upper Manhattan, using the streets as a chessboard. The Knight and Bishop follow. And the chess game begins.
Inspector Regal has been chosen by the killer to play the game, which he does through moves placed in the New York Times. As long as the game is interesting, no more bodies. But Regal is not a very good chess player, the game becomes dull for the killer, and another body appears. But Regal has an ace in the hole: a retired master player named Billy Abbott who left the chess world behind and disappeared before it took over his life. Abbott tells Regal the moves to make the game interesting, and for a while, he does — even turning the game around and winning. But having Regal win the game is not the object of the killer who targets Regal personally.
A series of sub-plots involve a cop working for Regal who had been killed during the line of duty while hunting down Panamanian drug runners, and a female cop who loved him and wants justice; a political side with Regal butting heads with his departmental rival who is in charge of both investigations; and a personal side, with Regal suspecting his wife of having an affair with a power mogul. This is the second “Dev Strkyer” novel, a nom-de-plume for Warren Murphy and Molly Cochran.
What I Liked
I love Murphy and Cochran’s work, and this one is no exception. Well-written, the chess strategies are well-mixed, and the story moves along fast enough with a lot of sub-plots mixed in to keep life interesting when the bodies are on hold. Even the political manouevering is interesting. The ending, although pat, is not a typical “everybody lives happily ever after” finish.
What I Didn’t Like
The climax is too pat, and too action-oriented rather than detection-based. I knew who the killer was long before they were revealed, and I’m not even sure why the authors chose to reveal the killer when they did, other than the realization perhaps that the reader already knows by then so the mystery is really gone. The only question was when and where they were going to be caught, if at all. As well, Stryker doesn’t really play fair with the reader at the start in terms of the depiction of the killer, but I still figured it out before the end despite the intentional misdirection.
Misty Patterson has problems: an abusive domineering husband and amnesia from her childhood. And now she has a new problem: her husband gets abusive again and she conks him with an Eskimo statue, hard enough seemingly to hurt but not to kill. Then she blacks out. He’s found dead a few days later after having been hit a second time with the same statue and dumped in the lake. And Misty doesn’t know what happened. Enter her lawyer, Nina Reilly, who is newly separated from her husband, newly separated from her neat legal firm, and new to the Lake Tahoe area. And her idea of a perfect introduction to the area is NOT a high-stakes murder case where everyone thinks Misty did it. Maybe even Misty herself.
What I Liked
The Lake Tahoe community comes alive as do some of the characters — Nina, herself; Misty; and Nina’s assistant. Lots of interesting facts about the area and the impact of the lake on a dead body. Well-written, all the characters are real, and adequately developed for the story. In fact, it’s an impressive array: Nina’s ex-husband on the peripheries along with her brother, sister-in-law, and Nina’s son; Paul, her investigator who’s warm for her form; a string of Misty’s lovers and their very jealous wives and girlfriends; Misty’s parents; and a couple of doctors who are trying to help Misty remember her past. A few loose threads are left for the next story in the “series”, if it does indeed become a series. And, on the legal side, the solution is handled in an interesting courtroom finale that is not like simple Perry Mason reruns. A good beginning for “Perry O’Shaughnessy”, which is a pseudonym for two sisters: Pamela (a lawyer) and Mary O’Shaughnessy (a writer).
What I Didn’t Like
The point-of-view switches from Misty to Nina to Paul in various chapters, and the switch does not really develop Misty’s or Paul’s character enough to justify the switch. Unfortunately, I figured out the three key elements of the “mystery” before the end of the story. Didn’t expect the ending, at least not exactly, but I did expect the “baddie”. There are a couple of places where it is a little heavy on the “legal” side, interpreting case law, which is a likely result of one of the two authors being a lawyer.
Private Investigator Jeri Howard is back and she’s lost a client. Rob Lawter comes to Jeri and retains her services, tells her that he’ll brief her later, but then takes a header out of his apartment window — suicide, accident or murder? Jeri investigates and takes a job as a legal secretary (her previous employment) at the company where Rob worked as a paralegal. All she has is a determination to help her now-dead client and an anonymous threatening note he received warning him about “blowing the whistle”. Lots of people enter stage left, and most of them stick around for the duration making it hard for Jeri to pin them down. Was it one of the lawyers? Was it the corporate bigwigs who took over the company in a hostile takeover and are they going to take the company apart piece-by-piece? Was it the plant managers conspiring to hide some terrible secret? Was it the brother-in-law who is trying to convince everyone that Rob committed suicide? And what do Rob’s neighbours know about what happened that night?
What I Liked
There are no super-human powers of deduction shown here by Jeri. She is a plodder — one piece of the puzzle at a time, turning it around and around to see if it fits anywhere. And a lot of the time, she doesn’t know what to do with the pieces and doesn’t try to make them fit anywhere. The writing is up to Dawson’s normal first-rate level and it is particularly interesting to see how Jeri goes about her non-investigating tasks around the office. The office, and the office politics, are made real by describing Jeri’s experiences — all of them, including the rules for working the photocopier. They set the tone for the workplace and most writers would have left them out. Dawson includes them, and the story is better for having them.
What I Didn’t Like
Jeri can be a bit of a dunce at times. Several “clues” leap off the page at the reader, but Jeri misses them, or rather, completely misses their significance — at the time. There are a couple like that, so the reader knows where the story is going when Jeri apparently doesn’t, and it is only to the credit of Dawson’s writing that you don’t say “Hurry up and get there already.” However, at the end, Dawson doesn’t play fair — there are two “clues” that turn everything around for Jeri, the final pieces of the puzzle, and the reader doesn’t get to see them until the solution is revealed. “Foul!”, I cry.
