Both Ends of the Night - Hardcover

Muller, Marcia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 089296622X ISBN 13: 9780892966226

Publisher: Mysterious Pr, 1997

Synopsis

Flight instructor Matty is murdered after she confides in private eye Sharon McCone that her boyfriend, John Seabrook, is missing, and Sharon's search for the killer leads her to a frozen wilderness.

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Reviews

The insular world of small airports, small planes, stunt flying, and flight instruction is explored in exhaustive detail in p.i. Sharon McCone's 18th case (The Broken Promise Land, 1996, etc.). Sharon has become a licensed pilot under the tutelage of tender-tough instructor Matty Windress at Los Alegres Municipal Airport, a short hop from San Francisco, where Sharon runs her investigative agency. Matty has lived for the last year with her boyfriend, John Seabrook, owner of a tree farm, and his young son Zachary. Now Seabrook has vanished, leaving Zachary behind, and Matty hires Sharon to find him. Matty knows nothing of Seabrook's past, but a letter surfaces within days instructing her to immediately withdraw the $70,000 he's wired into her bank account, then to take Zachary and disappear, telling no one her whereabouts. Matty balks--insists on carrying through her commitment to perform in an upcoming air show, and is killed when her plane crashes to the ground, sabotaged despite the efforts of Sharon and her lover Hy Ripinsky, once a flight instructor, to oversee the plane's safety. A saddened Sharon stashes Zachary with an old lawyer friend and gets to the business of dredging up Seabrook's life, using nephew Mick's computer skills; questioning every appropriate source; hopscotching the country in Hy's small plane or on commercial lines. There are more killings before she and Hy track down the root source of all the mayhem--Stirling Aviation, a manufacturing firm in Arkansas; its board of directors; its long- missing former head Duncan Stirling, and an old, still reverberating scandal. An overextended story that rambles all over the map--literally and otherwise--but still manages to excite and hold the reader's attention. Another sturdy performance from an old hand. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

There weren't any hard-boiled female sleuths before Marcia Muller created Sharon McCone in 1977. Twenty years later, the field is now crowded, but McCone remains among the best. Never defined solely by the novelty of her gender, McCone started out as a rich, complex character and has grown in depth as the books have accumulated. This time, she sets out to help a friend and former flying instructor find her missing lover, but soon the friend has been murdered, and a missing-persons case has been transformed into a grudge match. With the help of her own lover and fellow flyer Hy Ripinsky, McCone ventures into the depths of the federal witness protection program, finding first the missing lover and then the killer in the wilds of Minnesota. There's plenty of nicely paced action here, and the flying lore provides effective ballast. Best of all, though, there is McCone at work, both as day-to-day professional detective and as aggrieved friend out for justice. The tension between those two roles supplies the emotional center in this accomplished crime novel. Straightforward genre fare from a veteran who knows all the tricks. Bill Ott

Muller's Sharon McCone mysteries always seem to end up as main selections of the Mystery Guild. Here, McCone investigates a suspicious plane crash that claims a friend's beau.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mysterious Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 089296622X
• ISBN 13: 9780892966226
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 353