This book represents an acquisition from the Belleville Book Fair last weekend, where I got books for an amortized $.09 each ($2.00 a bag, I bought a bag and a half since Heather didn’t fill half of her bag, I got to fill that, too, so the 24+ books cost me less than a dime each). It’s a book club edition, so the real collectors will make fun of me on the playground, but I’m an accumulator more than a true collector.
This book features Pronzini’s nameless detective, a middle-aged collector of pulp fiction who is facing his own mortality as he frets during the course of the book about the results of a biopsy on a lesion in his lung. To distract himself, he heeds the call of his old friend Harry who has a tense situation at a remote fishing and hunting camp. A jealous husband, a potentially wandering hot young wife (red haired, natch), and a number of available fellows grind against each other mentally and physically. Nameless and Harry see a van containing a stolen Oriental rug smuggler crash into the lake, but they discover the man was dead before he hit the water. A couple other bodies pile up, and Nameless needs to find out who’s doing it and survive the detection.
It’s a thin book, and obviously a series book, but it’s contained fairly well for a single book. That is, we’re not lost without background details from the previous books. It’s short and serviceable as a piece of genre fiction, a quick read and a solution that’s obvious once you realize to whom Pronzini pays homage. Definitely worth a dime. Even if it’s only a book club edition.
