A. Night in Beverly Hills - Hardcover

Andrew J. Fenady

9780786277704: A. Night in Beverly Hills

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 078627770X ISBN 13: 9780786277704

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2005

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An Edgar Award-winning Author

Alex Night is a P.I. who wants to become a novelist like Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. But his clients have other ideas. When Alex is hired to drive and bodyguard Cynthia Alderdyce, who is wearing a couple million dollars' worth of jewels to Walter Annenberg's New Year's Eve party in Palm Desert, the limousine is pulled over by a pair of bogus cops. Alex is slugged, the jewels are grabbed, Alex recovers the jewels, is wounded again - and goes back to becoming a mystery writer.

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From Booklist

From its punny title (the central character's name is Alex Night) to its noir paraphernalia, this is more a mystery pastiche than a genuine crime novel. Night, the Beverly Hills sleuth who's trying to make a career change--he wants to write mysteries, not investigate them--can't seem to get rid of his last case, a jewel robbery that left one person dead and two others wounded, one of the two being Night himself. While he tries to make time with the beautiful writer in the office across the hall, Night also tries to figure out who was behind the jewel robbery. This is an affectionate, lighthearted homage to the noir mysteries of the 1930s and '40s, and it mostly succeeds. Unfortunately, the author tends to hit readers over the head with allusions to classic mysteries: not only is one character's name strikingly similar to that of a well-known figure in the genre, but Fenady, thinking we might miss it, takes time to point out the similarity. Entertaining (if not particularly subtle) fare for fans of the classic hard-boiled era. David Pitt
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