Blood Money, A Jane Whitefield Novel - Hardcover

Perry, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679453040 ISBN 13: 9780679453048

Publisher: Random House, 1999

Synopsis

"Thomas Perry just keeps getting better," said Tony Hillerman, about Sleeping Dogs--and in this superb new novel by one of America's best thriller writers, Jane Whitefield takes on the mafia, and its money.

Jane Whitefield, the fearless "guide" who helps people in trouble disappear, make victims vanish,has just begun her quiet new life as Mrs. Carey McKinnon, when she is called upon again, to face her toughest opponents yet.  Jane must try to save a young girl fleeing a deadly mafioso.  Yet the deceptively simple task of hiding a girl propels Jane into the center of horrific events, and pairs her with Bernie the Elephant, the mafia's man with the money.  Bernie has a photographic memory, and in order to undo an evil that has been growing for half a century,he and Jane engineer the biggest theft of all time, stealing billions from hidden mafia accounts and donating the money to charity.  Heart-stopping pace, fine writing, and mesmerizing characters combine in Blood Money to make it the best novel yet by the writer called "one of America's finest storytellers,"(San Francisco Examiner).

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Perry won an Edgar for The Butcher's Boy, and Metzger's Dog was one of The New York Times' Notable Books of the Year. His other books include The Face-Changers, Shadow Woman, Dance for the Dead, and Vanishing Act. He lives in Southern California with his wife and two daughters.

From the Back Cover

Praise for The Face-Changers


"The momentum never flags, and the suspense constantly builds..the Whitefield novels bring plotting and supsense to center stage without sacrificing character. That is no small achievement, the equivalent of a great architect also excelling at portraiture."--Booklist

Praise for Shadow Woman

"The suspense is unrelenting."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A fascinating tale written by one of America's finest storytellers...his best yet--and that is saying a lot becuase both Vanishing Act and Dance for the Dead were terrific."--San Francisco Examniner

"Enough suspense to keep the pages turning all day...or late into the night."
--Publishers Weekly

From the Inside Flap

Perry just keeps getting better," said Tony Hillerman, about Sleeping Dogs--and in this superb new novel by one of America's best thriller writers, Jane Whitefield takes on the mafia, and its money.<br><br>Jane Whitefield, the fearless "guide" who helps people in trouble disappear, make victims vanish,has just begun her quiet new life as Mrs. Carey McKinnon, when she is called upon again, to face her toughest opponents yet.  Jane must try to save a young girl fleeing a deadly mafioso.  Yet the deceptively simple task of hiding a girl propels Jane into the center of horrific events, and pairs her with Bernie the Elephant, the mafia's man with the money.  Bernie has a photographic memory, and in order to undo an evil that has been growing for half a century,he and Jane engineer the biggest theft of all time, stealing billions from hidden mafia accounts and donating the money to charity.  Heart-stopping pace, fine writing, and mesmerizing char

Reviews

Jane Whitefield, first introduced in Perry's Vanishing Act, makes her fifth appearance as a ghostmaker, someone who provides new identities for people in trouble. In this fast-paced thriller, Jane, a one-woman witness protection program, is semiretired, married to a doctor and living a quiet life until a teenage girl, Rita Shelford, comes to her door seeking help. The girl is being hunted, having witnessed a mob shakedown at the Florida house she was employed to clean. Protecting the girl propels Jane into a series of adventures involving Bernie the Elephant, an old man with a photographic memory who has kept Mafia financial records in his head for decades. With Jane's help, Bernie steals billions of dollars from the Mafia accounts and donates the money to charity. Not happy, the mobsters use every trick to capture Jane and Rita. The two women cross the U.S. several times, barely staying one step ahead of their pursuers. While there are many exciting moments, the story bogs down in several places while the mobsters speculate, rehashing information the reader already knows. Perry's writing style and vocabulary are easy and simplistic, and Jane sometimes seems too cool, and too smart, for her own good. The Mafia characters are numerous and interchangeable, and the story ends limply, with four unnecessary closing chapters. This is far from Perry's best, but it's still a quick, easy read with a few thrills. (Jan.) FYI: Perry won an Edgar for The Butcher's Boy.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Jane Whitefield usually makes people disappear (The Face-Changers, 1998, etc.), but this time it's money: mob money that prompts La Cosa Nostra to chase Native American Jane all over the country in a terrifically plotted nail-biter. When trying to explain her remarkable talent for aiding clients to elude the ill-disposed, Jane often credits her Senecan forebears, so many of them expert trackers (and un-trackers). Be that as it may, she's world-class at the vanishing actso good that by now the process has become addictive. Thus, despite those promises to her beloved husband, Dr. Carey McKinnon, few Whitefield fans will expect her to say no when 18-year-old Rita Shalford asks for help. Waiflike Rita kept house in Miami for Bernie Lupus, ostensible owner of a property that in reality belongs to a ``Family'' consortium. Waiflike in his own right (though 70), Bernie was for years the mob's money-minder. Now, clinging together for support, he and Rita are on the run because the LCN (La Cosa Nostra) has grown nervous about the booty and distrustful of its minder. Through a friend, they've come to Jane. Not only do they want to disappear, they want that mountain of money wrested from the control of the wicked. But how? What can be done to ten billion dollars to remove it permanently from organized evil-doers? Easy, Jane says. Give it to organized good-doers, the Red Cross and hundreds upon hundreds of other charities, thereby chilling the blood of all self-respecting capos. Well, not so easy, actually, but the fun is in how it gets done, and in Jane's elegant razzle-dazzle, as again and again the mob grabs at her slender form only to come up clutching thin air. Compulsively readable. If Jane seems to know more about everything than anybody else, so be it. You'll like it that way. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In Perry's tenth novel (the fifth in the Jane Whitefield series), JaneAwho is part Native American and who regularly helps fugitives disappearAleaves the attractions of husband and home to help an 18-year-old and an old man who are fleeing the mob. About to be replaced by computers and facing certain death, Bernie "the Elephant" Lupus, who handledAin his headAthe finances of 12 major mob families for 50 years, fakes his own murder and winds up in the hands of Jane, at first out to help only his maid. But soon the three of them, along with an accountant, are involved in a plot to steal over $14 billion of the mob's investments and then donate the funds to charity. Even readers who find the setup far-fetched will enjoy the fast pace of this entertaining thriller with its resourceful heroine, fascinating characters, convincing development of intrigue, and ever-present menace.
-ARonnie H. Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

" I'm not a believer in last stands. I'm a believer in running." But Jane Whitefield, a professional "guide" who helps people in trouble disapper, hopes she's through running. Married to a surgeon and living quietly in upstate New York, Jane wants to set down roots of her own rather than helping others uproot themselves from endangered lives. A good plan--until a girl in trouble knocks on the door and mentions the name of a mafioso with whom Jane has a past. All of Perry's Whitefield novels are plot-rich adventures in which the external world hides threats both seen and unseen, making details matter even more than they do in daily life. This time the idea of outthinking the opposition, or at least thinking first, is even more at the center of things than usual, since one of the two people Jane strives to disappear is Bernie the Elephant, the Mob's one-man money launderer who cleanses warring families' cash but never writes anything down--the location of the loot is all in his memory, much as Jane's success as a guide is contingent on the details in her head. Hatching a plan to give the Mob's money to charity, Jane and Bernie quickly learn that making money disappear is every bit as tricky as making people disappear. What makes this series so consistently engaging is not only Perry's ability to cleverly untie the Gordian knot of his plots but also to draw us closer and closer to his people. Details make a successful thriller, but they can also overwhelm the inferior one. Perry mixes plot and character with great delicacy, producing a superbly emulsified whole. Bill Ott

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"Sure I do," said Jane. "There is no way that you could have learned that Celia knew me unless Celia told you." The girl had really seen Celia, but that didn't mean Celia was right about her. There had to be some other way, some sensible solution that Celia simply hadn't thought of. Jane wanted to say, "I'm not Jane Whitefield anymore. People who are about to die don't come to me anymore and ask me to make them vanish. I can't leave my husband and take on your problem. I made a promise." Maybe if she knew more, she could figure out a way to help this child without risking her own chance for a new life. "What made you go to Celia?"

The girl said, "I went to her because she was nice to me once a few years ago, when my mother had a fight with her boyfriend and the police came. Celia said that if I was in trouble I should come back."

When Jane heard the word "mother," she felt a half-second of hope-that's right, she's a kid, so there's a mother-but the rest of the sentence dampened it. "Where are your parents now?"

"My father ... I don't know about him. He was just another boyfriend, and he took off when I was a baby. My mother, she had some trouble a couple of years ago and. . ." The girl shrugged placidly. "You know. She's a doper."

So much for the mother. "How long has she been in jail?"

"A year and a half, about, counting the trial. They won't make her do the whole five."

"What about you? Who has been taking care of you?"

The girl shrugged again. "My mother lied to them and said I had an aunt that was taking care of me. I asked her to, and it was the least she could do after something stupid like that: set me free. Otherwise, they lock you up in a county home, or they farm you out to foster parents, who lock you up at their house, and I wasn't the one who did anything to get locked up. So I bought some ID from a guy I used to watch in a park selling driver's licenses and Social Security cards to Central Americans who came to pick fruit. I went all the way to Tampa to search for jobs, so the ID didn't look too familiar."

Jane kept probing, listening for some statement that had to be a lie. "What was the job?"

"Hotel maid. You work pretty hard, but it was just cleaning and making beds, and I knew how to do that much."

Jane said, "All right, Rita. Let's get to your problem. Exactly what kind of trouble are you in?"

"It's hard to say."

"You mean you don't know, or just that it's hard for you to tell me?"

"I don't really know. I was working at the hotel. There was this man who stayed there a lot. He was nice. Kind of handsome for an old guy, and funny. His name is Danny."

"How old?"

"At least thirty." She saw Jane's eyes begin to look as though she'd heard the story before, and said hastily, "It's not that kind of trouble. Danny never touched me. He had a girlfriend. She never even pretended she wasn't married. The first time I saw her she had a wedding ring on, with a great big diamond. He would meet her at the hotel about once a week around lunch time, and they would do it for about an hour. Then she would slip out the back entrance and go to a parking ramp a block away where she put her car. Fancy."

"The car?"

"The car too, but mostly her. Very expensive clothes, a lot of jewelry, big hair. The car was a cream-colored Mercedes convertible. Danny was there on some kind of business, and for the rest of the day, other men would come to his room, some with briefcases and some with nothing, but all kind of... not quite clean, you know? Like they didn't get a shower that day, just put on their clothes and combed their hair."

"And?"

"Danny knew that I knew what was going on. One day I'm on his hall when she leaves in a hurry, practically running. He came into a room I was cleaning and gave me twenty bucks to give his room a quick clean-up first. The man who was going to be there in about fifteen minutes was this woman's husband."

"He told you that?"

She smiled and shook her head. "No. He kind of gave me a sheep-face grin, like I was the one who caught him at something. A few minutes later I couldn't help knowing. It was the car. The man drove up to the front of the hotel with a car so the valet would park it, and it was the same one the girlfriend had used the week before. Anyway, I had just cleaned the room, got rid of everything that had her lipstick on it or smelled like her perfume." She frowned. "It was a good thing, too. Her husband was scary. He was maybe sixty, and he wasn't big, but he had eyes like one of those turtles at the zoo they tell you is four hundred years old-and how they found that out, I'd like to know. I mean, who was there? But you get the picture about him. He had three guys with him. Two came in a different car, but they were all wrong. You know how you can see somebody and something inside you says, This isn't normal? The three were all young-late twenties or thirties-and they were just wrong. They wore suits, but they didn't look like men who wear suits. They were all big, like weight lifters, and the suits looked like they all bought them in the same store on the same day, and it was yesterday. You see men like that, but not usually three of them."

"So what happened?"

"Nothing. They came and left in about a half hour. My friend Danny came out looking like he just got to the end of a tightrope, and smiled at me again. Next time he came to town, he offered me a job."

"What kind of job?"

"It was the same thing-cleaning. He offered me three times what I was getting at the hotel. There was this house in the Keys, and I was supposed to clean it. That's all."

Jane sighed. "And it turned out there was more to the job than cleaning."

"No," said Rita. "That was it."

Jane decided not to make more guesses aloud. Maybe this Danny just figured that if he could bribe her to keep his secret, the husband could bribe her to reveal it.

Rita said, "It was a beautiful house, on the ocean. The one who lived there was a nice old man. I was there for a year. It was great."

"When did it stop being great?"

"Three days ago. The old man went away for a little trip. My friend Danny took him to the airport at four in the morning. I figured this was a great chance to show off, so I spent the whole day giving the house a real cleaning. There's nothing in that place that can be polished or waxed or shined that wasn't that day. I didn't stop until about nine at night. I took a shower and fell asleep as soon as I was off my feet. The next thing I know, there are eight or nine big guys. They come into the house in the middle of the night-not like burglars. They were talking loud and stomping around like they were in a big hurry. For a second or two, I thought it must be firemen coming in because I left something plugged in and started a fire. Then three of them come into my room. They look wrong, like the ones at the hotel. They haul me out of bed. One starts asking me all kinds of questions-where the old man kept this, or that. I don't know any of the answers. When they figure that out and go down the hall, I go straight to the closet and start packing. One of them comes in again, and when he sees the suitcase, he flips it over on the bed and says I'm not leaving. I'm going with them."


"Did he say where?"

"He said 'To see Mr. Delfina.'"

Jane's jaw tightened. "Do you know who that is?"

"No. But it sounded like I was supposed to. You know: Mister."

Jane stopped listening, but the girl didn't notice. "So I left the suitcase there on the bed where they could see it, and left my clothes and everything, and I put my money and ID and my mother's picture and stuff in my jacket pockets. After daybreak, most of them left. There were only three of them searching the closets and the attic, and one in the back yard. I went out the sliding door off the patio on the side, went over the wall, and walked to the bus stop. . .

Jane watched the girl's lips move, and she knew she should be listening, or should tell the girl to stop because she would have to hear it all. The girl didn't know that she was thinking about the husband she loved so deeply, and that her eyes weren't focused on the kitchen window because she was concentrating on the story. She was looking at it because she was getting used to the idea that she might never see it again. The girl didn't know that she had said the only word that had needed to be said: Delfina.

After a moment, Jane turned and switched off the burners on the stove and closed the window, then walked through the house checking the others. When she came back the girl was standing beside the table, her skinny arms now crossed on her chest so each hand gripped the opposite elbow as though she were protecting herself from the cold. Jane said, "Does anyone besides Celia Fulham know you came here?"

"No," said the girl. "I never heard of you before yesterday, and I didn't get off the bus until I got to Celia."

"What about after that? Where did you sleep last night?"

"A hotel." She reached into her pocket, pulled out a pack of matches, and handed it to Jane. "I kept those so I'd know my way home."

Jane's eyebrows knitted as she looked at the matchbook. The girl had called it home, and it was probably as much of a home as anywhere. Jane knew the hotel, and it wasn't the sort of place she had expected. It wasn't a cheap, obscure cluster of wooden buildings on a little-used highway. It was a big, respectable hotel. Jane returned the mat...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679453040
• ISBN 13: 9780679453048
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368