COPP IN SHOCK

During a three-week bout with amnesia, Copp marries a woman who subsequently turns up dead, and as he struggles to clear his head, the police try to pin the murder on him. By the author of Copp on Ice.

Pendleton first made a splash with the neo-pulp Executioner series, and his sixth Joe Copp thriller ( Copp On Ice etc.) is true to those roots: each short chapter features at least one major plot twist or murder. PI Copp wakes up in an L.A. hospital suffering from amnesia and a gunshot wound. He doesn't recognize the name of Martha Kaufman, whom he learns was killed in his house at the same time he was injured. Escaping from the hospital to his home, Copp finds a clue that sends him to a small mountain town in Northern California, where the locals seem to know him, where Martha Kaufman's art gallery and home seem famliar--and where he finds a recent Lake Tahoe marriage license for Martha Kaufman and Joe Copp! That's just the start of a roller-coaster ride of mayhem, murder and a million-dollar cache in a safe deposit box. The ending is a Big Switcheroo, also bloody, that will surprise readers. But Pendleton plays fair and square; if his tale isn't very deep ("There are a lot of badass people out on the streets--anywhere, everywhere") it's still rollicking fun.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Old pro Pendleton gives p.i. Joe Copp a case of amnesia and a nasty concussion, then turns him loose to find out not only who brained him but how and why his gun was used to kill Martha Kaufman--a woman he can't even remember meeting. A painting in his apartment leads him to Martha's art gallery up in Mammoth Lakes, and to the revelation that he and Martha had quietly married a few weeks before her death. Several messy murders later, Joe is wary of the local police chief, newly aware of an arranged first marriage between Martha and a homosexual co-worker of her wealthy dad with ``business concerns'' in Vegas, and in possession of a million bucks in bearer bonds from Martha's safe-deposit box. A photograph of two surprising couples, a self-inflicted wound that sets up an alibi, and an empty coffin finally add up to a whopping marital crisis for Joe, who, in effect, twice becomes a widower before his memory returns in full. Typical Pendleton bed'em and dead'em saga, better plotted than the two previous Copp novels but as macho and frenetic as the three before those. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.