Synopsis
A job of pure simplicity. Find a white girl in Brixton. Piece of cake. What I should have done is doubled my medication and lit a candle to St Jude - maybe a lot of candles.
Add in a lethal ex-con, an Irish builder obsessed with Gene Hackman, the biggest funeral Brixton has ever seen, and what you get is the Blues like they've never been sung before.
Reviews
A gay, manic-depressive, thoroughly disreputable ex-con with a violent streak, Tony Brady is also vibrantly alive and capable of dropping insightful quotes from Genet, Baldwin or Maupin gleaned from his prison reading. At the beginning of this slang-filled noir caper from London, Tony has settled in to a sweet racket with a former cellmate from Wormwood Scrubs, Elias Rasheed Mohammed?Reed for short. Together they conduct a useful little business finding lost items, even if they have to make the items disappear so that they can recover them for the grateful owners. Tony is approached by a wealthy builder named Jack Dunphy and asked to find his runaway teenage daughter. With Reed and little effort he succeeds. The problem is that the Brixton tough the daughter is with isn't going to give her up easily. And when Reed and Tony decide to play both ends against the middle, violence is the inevitable result. Bruen combines jazz, drugs, sex and violence into a heady brew that goes down easy and leaves a long aftertaste.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Tony Brady, whose search for a Labour MP's Yorkshire terrier has earned him the title of ``Ace Ventura of Vauxhall,'' is a gay, balding manic-depressive (or at least cyclothymic) who's stopped taking his lithium. Naturally, racist, homophobic, well-connected Irish builder Jack Dunphy, who looks just like Gene Hackman, is convinced that Brady's the perfect man to locate his missing Cambridge-educated daughter Roz. And he's right, because only a few days after he takes Jack's money, Brady and his prison mate, Elias Rasheed Mohammed, find Roz slinking around the Ballistic, a black Brixton club that's home base to a bloke named Leon, who must have something that's keeping Roz happy. Bring her back anyway, says Jack, shoving a fat wad of notes at the master sleuths. Nothing could be simpler than following the client's orders, so Brady and Reed decide to grab Roz from Leon but keep her themselves, extracting payoffs from both the solicitous father and the outraged lover. Even in the hands of someone not so obsessed with blues, toy boys, and Gene Hackman, this would be a less-than-brilliant idea, but fans of Bruen's blistering noir valentine, Rilke on Black (1997), will enjoy seeing the Keystone Crooks get picked off one by one. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
This violent, profane novel (it uses the f-word on its back cover) is also wickedly entertaining and, in places, quite funny. Tony Brady is hired by a would-be Gene Hackman look-alike to find his missing daughter. Sounds simple enough--until Tony sees an opportunity to make a lot of money and starts improvising, thus complicating matters and winding up in the middle of a kidnapping. Fans of gritty, witty crime stories--like those of Elmore Leonard--will be thoroughly delighted by this twisted caper novel. But the not-for-all-tastes clichecertainly applies here: readers with a dislike for strong language, or who prefer their violence merely hinted at, will want to steer clear. But make no mistake: Bruen's sojourn among London's underclass is a cutting-edge British thriller. David Pitt
The job is to find the girl. Given that Roz is white, upper crust, and reported to be in Brixton, a predominantly black section of London, it seems simple enough. But just as in Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely, things go wrong quickly. The girl's father is Jack Dunphy, a big shot in the building trades with a fancied resemblance to the actor Gene Hackman (hence the title). And Roz is being kept by Leon, a debonair but ruthless black club-owner in Brixton. The detective on the case is Tony Brady, who will be the first to tell you that he is gay, manic-depressive, and on the wrong side of 50. During this case he is stuck in manic mode, with the emphasis distinctly on nonstop action. When Brady decides to earn his fortune by playing Dunphy off against Leon, the bullets fly fast, and, for those seeking a dollop of pop culture, so do the allusionsAeverything from Anne Sexton and Armistead Maupin to the Three Stooges. Some of the references (e.g., the Big Issue, a magazine hawked by U.K. homeless) may be unfamiliar here, but readers of hard-boiled British mysteries such as those by Quintin Jardine and Ian Rankin should enjoy this gritty page-turner.ABob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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