Bottom Liner Blues - Hardcover

Constantine, K. C.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892962895 ISBN 13: 9780892962891

Publisher: Mysterious Press, 1993

Synopsis

With its shut-down mines, with its scarred and restive blue-collar descendants of Eastern European and Italian immigrants, Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, is in the midst of tough times. And no one has it tougher than its own police chief, Mario Balzic. Working harder and longer hours than he ever did in his long-ago rookie days, Balzic again pilots a black-and-white through the town's brooding streets. The recent death of his mother, whose warm presence is especially missed by his wife Ruth, doesn't make it easier. Balzic answers a call: a strange woman, Valery, mother of a young daughter named Coo, warns that her violent husband may exact a brutal form of revenge on a truck-driver with a shady past. She wants Balzic to head off the attack, but supplies few details. Balzic senses worse trouble ahead than suggested by Valery - and events prove Balzic's instincts apocalyptically correct. Meanwhile, at the local tavern, Balzic encounters Myushkin, a wild, deceptively eccentric Russian-American writer, with nine novels to his credit, no visible means of support, and an alarming facility with a .22 revolver. It's Myushkin who becomes Balzic's spiritual guide through the case - and a peculiarly American, distinctly personal brand of hell.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Abandoning most conventions of the police procedural (but not pitch-perfect dialogue) in his tenth Mario Balzic tale, Constantine shrewdly observes social mores in economically depressed Rocksburg, Pa., and takes aim at the literary establishment in the process. On a visit to Muscotti's Bar, police chief Balzic gets an earful of woes from foul-mouthed author Nick Myushkin, who has penned nine critically acclaimed books but is currently broke and must leave home so his wife can collect welfare. Nick believes authors are exploited by readers who get their books from libraries and suggests that this can be remedied by tax credits to authors--not by subsidies to writing "artistes," of whom he is grandly contemptuous. Why does Nick tell this to a cop? Because he's troubled and needs to talk, a condition Mario realizes has become pervasive in Rocksburg. Lonely people call in complaints to get attention from the police, while at home his wife Ruth, who attends a women's seminar at a local college, wants to talk because she can no longer confide in Mario's mother (who died in Sunshine Enemies, the most recent Balzic title). Beleaguered Mario, your average guy, listens, tries to help, sometimes loses his temper and finally recovers a troubling memory from Iwo Jima. Constantine takes a hard look at the world and discovers it doesn't make sense--which makes a pretty good mystery after all.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A tenth appearance for Rocksburg, Pennsylvania, police chief Mario Balzic (Sunshine Enemies, 1990, etc.)--who, here, has three problems on his hands: a woman has gotten it into her head that her husband wants to beat up his girlfriend's new boyfriend; Mario's lonely wife, Ruthie, says she'd like to dissolve their marriage contract and start all over--with Mario talking to her instead of yelling; and Myushkin, a broke Russian-American writer, is brandishing a gun and forcing Mario to listen to his diatribe against libraries that rip him off ``in direct violation of the Fifth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Amendments''--a diatribe against library inequities that goes on for the better part of a hundred pages. Moreover, Mario's Iwo Jima nightmare is breaking through decades of repression; and the crimes, plights, and pleas that he's confronting don't really stop so much as go on hiatus. Dialogue par excellence, and saloon philosophers aplenty, but a failure as a mystery: Do the crimes perpetrated on writers by public libraries build a plot or merely a soapbox? -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mysterious Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0892962895
• ISBN 13: 9780892962891
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 250