Blood Type: The New John Marshall Tanner Mystery - Hardcover

Greenleaf, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0688112684 ISBN 13: 9780688112684

Publisher: William Morrow & Co, 1992

Synopsis

Certain that the death of Tom Crandall was not a suicide, John Marshall Tanner investigates and learns from Crandall's homeless, paranoid brother some clues that involve greed and malevolence. 25,000 first printing. $15,000 ad/promo.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Greenleaf ( Book Case ) packs a wallop in this 10th John Marshall Tanner mystery, which brings the lawyer turned investigator to San Francisco's Tenderloin district for a gritty, chilling series of events. Tanner's drinking buddy, dour Tom Crandall, is found dead, apparently of a self-administered drug overdose. But Tanner, who knew that Tom's marriage to torch singer Clarissa Duncan was crumbling, believes his friend was murdered. His suspicions fall on Clarissa's new beau, multimillionaire entrepreneur Richard Sands. Tanner thinks that Tom's mentally disturbed brother Nick might know why the dead man, in his last message, accused Sands of being "evil incarnate." Searching for Nick in the Tenderloin, Tanner gets involved with a blood hustler named Dracula, who convinces the area's inhabitants that they have liquid gold in their veins. How Tanner figures out who killed Tom and why comes as an anticlimax, after he eliminates one suspect in a grisly game of chicken involving the threatened intravenous administration of tainted blood. Centering on plasma centers, blood banks, HIV, AIDS and donors in the inner city, this isn't a story for the squeamish.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

When drinking buddy Tom Crandall is found in an abandoned Tenderloin terminal dead of an injection of epinephrine, S.F. shamus John Marshall Tanner (Book Case, etc.) rejects the police theory of suicide, suspecting instead an importunate romantic rival: Richard Sands, the ultrarich businessman pursuing Tom's wife Clarissa. Wrong motive, right suspect--because Sands is clearly up to his neck in a plot to recoup his recent losses by meddling with the city's blood supply: a plot whose tremors reach so far--from Tom's schizophrenic brother Nicky to a blood-donor harvester called Dracula to a gaggle of seamy medicos who've developed a new approach to AIDS research--that the question of who actually pushed the plunger hardly matters. Slow-starting and disjointed in its storytelling (Tanner--now in his eighth outing--keeps inadvertently digging up exactly the right people), but fueled by a truly horrifying vision of corporate/medical research. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: William Morrow & Co
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0688112684
• ISBN 13: 9780688112684
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 283