Synopsis
Things aren't going well for private investigator Carroll Dorsey. Because of the notoriety arising from his last big case, the Pittsburgh detective's business has dried up, and his on-again, off-again romance with Dr. Gretchen Keller is mostly off. But events take an abrupt turn when he is hired by an elderly woman to find her missing granddaughter, sending Dorsey on a search through the streets, schools, and taverns of a tough blue-collar neighborhood.
It's a seemingly straightforward missing persons case until he encounters a corrupt local doctor, the neighborhood's drug-fueled underground, and a beautiful state cop looking to make the big bust. And in a more personal vein, Dorsey must again confront his politically powerful father, uncovering the skeletons in his own family's closet.
Reviews
The ghost of Lipinsky's first Carroll Dorsey mystery, the 1994 Shamus nominee The Fall-Down Artist, hovers distractingly over the first few chapters of his second book about the Pittsburgh PI. But soon the references to past adventures become as natural a part of this gritty, expertly crafted story about drugs, death, family and honor in a working-class neighborhood as the Rolling Rock and Iron City beers consumed by the hundreds. A former Duquesne basketball star whose knee blew out before he could try for the pros, a law school dropout and son of a powerful politician, a bachelor whose occupational violence disrupts his relationship with Dr. Gretchen Keller, Dorsey is more than the sum of these slightly shopworn parts. The relatively slow arc of Lipinsky's story is a refreshing change from the fast-break style of most mysteries. As Dorsey searches for the missing 17-year-old granddaughter of a tough old Polish-American woman, he makes mistakes, follows false leads, places his trust in the wrong places. Forced to make a choice between two villains, one of whom happens to be his father, he does what he hopes is right and then goes to ask his elderly uncle if it was. His indecision makes him one of us and a series figure whose appearances will likely be more and more welcome.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
With his days as Al Rosek's replacement bartender numbered by the return of Rosek's regular man, Pittsburgh gumshoe Carroll Dorsey finds himself getting pulled back into investigative work by old Mrs. Leneski, who's convinced that neighborhood junkies have made off with her granddaughter, Maritsa Durant, missing for two months. Maritsa's troubles have their start close to home, since her father, Teddy Durant, is so strung out on dope that the girl had been living with her grandmother. Those troubles go much deeper, though, as Dorsey realizes when he searches Teddy's filthy rooms and finds one of Maritsa's favorite books with her place marked by a prescription blank from Dr. Anton Novotny, the local candy man and connoisseur of young females. But even Novotny, a postwar German refugee as ageless as a vampire, pales beside the corruption of Dorsey's own father, the Pittsburgh politico, lately toppled by a stroke, whose calamitous legacy is far outliving his power. Dorsey's scrabble among the maggots is unrelieved by any glimmer of hope: Even his sex life, as he bounces back and forth between his keep-your-distance lover Dr. Gretchen Keller and pushy cop Janice Manning (whose romantic overture is ``What would you say to an offer of getting laid?'') is a downer. Even darker than Dorsey's grim debut, The Fall-Down Artist (1994): perfect reading material for one of those rainy days you wish would go on forever. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Pittsburgh private investigator Carroll Dorsey is making ends meet tending bar when an old friend puts him in touch with Mrs. Leneski, who wants Dorsey to find her granddaughter, Maritsa Durant. The old woman feels the stunningly beautiful teenager may have fallen in with junkies and street people. The case takes Dorsey into Pittsburgh's self-contained and secretive ethnic neighborhoods as well as its equally suspicious drug underground. In addition, Dorsey is forced to cope with the advances of a lovely policewoman who senses the possibility of a high-profile arrest. There are also family issues for Dorsey when the case intrudes upon the turf of his politically connected father. The second in the Dorsey series is a solid, entertaining private-eye novel that offers little in the way of originality but compensates with palpable atmosphere, street-smart dialogue, and a likable hero. Wes Lukowsky
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