Still Life - Softcover

Hanson, Rick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1575662000 ISBN 13: 9781575662008

Publisher: Kensington Pub Corp, 1997

Synopsis

During a visit to New Mexico with his business manager and lover, Alison, ex-cop-turned-sculptor Adam McCleet finds himself at a rustic hideaway in Morning, an unmapped desert town filled with strange inhabitants, the prime suspect in a local murder. Reprint.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Having fun with the artistic and spiritual excesses of Taos, N.M., as he mixes murder and wisecracking nutcases, Hanson seems, at first, to go over the top. But the goofiness grows on you. Ex-cop Adam McCleet (Spare Parts; Mortal Remains) travels to Taos in his third offbeat adventure, eager to display his sculptures in a show arranged by his girlfriend, Allison Brooks, a Portland, Ore., gallery owner. Outside of town, McCleet becomes prime suspect in the murder of an old prospector. The death may be connected to the search for an interplanetary time traveler who landed in Taos and, legend has it, is buried thereabouts. Countless loopy locals are obsessed with finding the grave. There's Rob Crusoe, a former rock star now leading a cult devoted to military drills and nude volleyball; Gunter Bjornsen, a rich retired scientist who lives in a high-tech teepee and has part of a map to the alien grave; McCleet's own much-divorced sister, Margot, and her property caretaker, Whines For No Reason, known as Whiney. Under attack by rattlesnakes, snipers and tabloid reporters, McCleet must find the killer to clear his name and save his neck. Hanson, who maintains the good humor throughout, has Taos's spirit down pat: "I own an art gallery," Allison tells Whiney. "Who doesn't?" he responds.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Weird is the word for what happens to cop-turned-sculptor Adam McCleet (Mortal Remains, 1995, etc.) when Alison Brooks, the Portland gallery owner who admires his body of work as much as he admires her body, drags him down to Taos for a show. When inoffensive Dental Stoker, the man who gives them directions to Adam's sister Margot's ranch, is murdered under Adam's nose, Sheriff Shirley Gomez-Gomez arrests Adam--along with Dental's son and his wife, a former rock singer, a Swedish physicist with a fixation on a luminescent alien, and his aspiring son-in-law, Dustin. The mystery will lead Adam and the other suspects--each as brightly colored and thin as a paper doll--to rattlesnakes, New Age nudists, and the inevitably anticlimactic alien remains. Hanson's obvious geniality makes this installment as easy to take--and as hard to remember--as his first two. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Kensington Pub Corp
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1575662000
• ISBN 13: 9781575662008
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 253