A HOPELESS CASE

Jane da Silva returns to Seattle to claim an inheritance from her uncle and finds a glitch in the will that forces her to take over his favorite charity--a private investigating firm for hopeless cases.

Beck's ( Death in a Deck Chair ) newest mystery offers a neat twist as a premise for what could turn out to be a delightful series. In her late 30s and tired of eking out an existence in Europe, expatriate widow Jane Silva is offered a substantial inheritance if she will assume her late uncle's quixotic profession of solving hopeless cases for those who have no other recourse. Seattle, her childhood home, at first seems to provide little scope for the type of situation that would fit the criteria of the will (which mandates absolutely no publicity), but soon Jane is approached by Leonora Martin, a talented young musician who wants to finance her further studies by regaining the substantial amount of money her now-dead hippie mother, Linda, had given years before to a cult called the Fellowship of the Flame. With the aid of attorney Calvin Mason, another collector of lost causes, Jane starts poking around, despite attacks on her person and the murder of an artist who may have known Linda. Ignoring the warnings of the personable detective on the case, Jane continues her dangerous sleuthing. A good, clean writer with an eye for apt description, Beck has created a breezy and modern detective in a relatively little-mined setting.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Here, the author moves away from her frequent 20's milieu (Peril Under the Palms, etc.) and into the life of one Jane da Silva, expatriate widow of a racing-car driver, brought back from Europe to her Seattle hometown by a legacy from her uncle Harold. To inherit the big bucks involved, Jane must prove she can continue his private charity: the finding and successful resolution of cases of true injustice--hopeless cases. One falls into her lap, however, through seedy but honest lawyer p.i. Calvin Mason: teenaged, gifted pianist Leonora, daughter of burnt-out ex-hippie Kenny Martin and long-dead Linda Donnelly, has no money to further her career. Linda had given an inherited quarter of a million to her cult of the moment--the Fellowship of the Flame--and died of drowning soon after. Jane determines to recover the money and sets out to trace the now-defunct Fellowship's chief guru, upsetting lots of people along the way--one of them to the point of murder--but finally achieving her goal in a roundabout way. Despite all of this, the trustees ruling on Jane's worthiness to inherit decide she's still on trial, and the reader can envision a series of hopeless cases to come. Manages to stay just this side of silliness and be mildly entertaining in the process. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.