An Image to Die For - Hardcover

Phillips, Mike

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0002325616 ISBN 13: 9780002325615

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1995

Synopsis

Street-smart reporter Sam Dean finds himself embroiled in another whodunit when the television producer who offers Dean the onscreen job of investigating a murder is himself murdered, leaving Dean to solve both mysteries.

About this title

Review:

Sam Dean is one of the most interesting characters in recent mystery fiction--a black freelance journalist and amateur detective living in London, who gives us the chance to see a decidedly different side of British life than the ones we usually get in genre fiction. When a documentary about a convicted murderer begins to take on a dangerous life of its own, Dean is drafted by his film-maker friend to find out why. This allows Sam to do some digging into his own life as well as the chances his teenage son has of finding success and happiness.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Even before he's found out why an old friend, TV producer Wyndham Davis, has asked him to pop over, rolling-stone London journalist Sam Dean's confronted with a corpse: a production assistant knifed outside the apartment where Davis is taping an interview for a true-crime program he's trying to sell. Inside the apartment, things aren't going much better: Davis's plan to exculpate Leon Ross, convicted of hacking his wife and young daughter to death, is foundering with the disappearance of Helen Ross's half-caste boyfriend Amaryll Johnson. ``I never liked being brought in to do the black stuff,'' grumbles Dean, but he agrees to go hunting for Johnson. What he finds along the way is a world of rapacious creditors, abandoned lovers, and casually disintegrating families--as well as his own dangerously rekindled affair with Davis's importunate wife Sarah, who's learned quite a few new tricks since their long-ago romance, not to mention some sordid secrets about the TV production crew that's trying to one- up the justice system. It's only a matter of time before Sam's thrown off the case and has to continue on his own, ``for revenge, or because I'm obsessed, or because I can't think of anything else to do, or because I'm in selfless pursuit of the truth.'' The jagged, propulsive rhythms of Phillips's writing carry Sam's fourth case (Point of Darkness, 1995, etc.) over the bogs of overplotted intrigue. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0002325616
• ISBN 13: 9780002325615
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224