Scam (Stanley Hastings Mysteries) - Hardcover

Hall, Parnell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892966238 ISBN 13: 9780892966233

Publisher: Mysterious Pr, 1997

Synopsis

Stanley Hastings has a client - a real-life, money-paying client. That's the good news. The bad news is that this client might be the most frustrating thing to come along in years.
"I'm being set up," is all that six-foot-six Cranston Pritchert says to Stanley when he first darkens Stanley's doorway. Why is the investment firm partner being set up? How? By whom? Cranston can't seem to answer even the simplest of questions. Instead, he sends Stanley off to an East Side singles bar to track down an unforgettably endowed blonde. Stanley finds his woman, and even finds the theatrical agent behind her. But when he tries to unravel the alleged setup, all clues point to Pritchert himself...and murder.
Suddenly, the players in this mystery are falling like dominoes, and a dyspeptic policeman decides that Stanley Hastings is the one to blame. Facing three counts of murder and having your face emblazoned across the television screen is not Stanley's idea of a good time. Going to prison - and maybe the chair - is even worse.

About this title

Reviews

Wendy and Janet, ambulance-chasing lawyer Richard Rosenberg's twimbo secretaries, are on vacation, and Richard's penny-ante p.i. Stanley Hastings has a rare case of his own. That's the extent of the good news. The bad news is that investment advisor Cranston Pritchert is the world's worst client. He's convinced that the bosomy blond who picked him up at a singles bar and left him holding his head in a nearby gutter trying to remember what happened next was setting him up in some way that was related to a proxy fight for control of Philip Greenberg Investments. But Stanley has to battle his own client for every ounce of cooperation. Worse, he suspects whiny Pritchert's started to manufacture evidence (why?) indicating a scam against himself. Worse still, Pritchert is killed, and the NYPD--not Stanley's usual nemesis, Sgt. MacAullif, but an even nastier cop who seems to have a personal grudge against MacAullif and everybody he's ever met--is convinced that Stanley is the killer. It doesn't help when they find evidence against Stanley on the scene of two related homicides. But related how? As usual, Hall (Trial, 1996, etc.), like Rumpelstiltskin, takes slender material that would serve another writer for a middling short story and spins a gossamer web of riddles by turns puzzling, suspenseful, and hilarious. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Private investigator Stanley Hastings essentially has one client, an energetic personal-injury attorney. Stanley spends most of his days meeting accident victims, taking pictures of their injuries, and signing them up for the attorney. So, when an honest-to-goodness client seeks his investigative services, Stanley takes the case. The naive detective soon learns that his client is scamming him--but he doesn't know why. Then his client gets murdered. Then a woman Stanley interviewed also gets offed, and Stanley is arrested for murder. Scam is a slight, sly confection, largely played for laughs that almost always come at Stanley's expense. Everyone is far shrewder, more insightful, and more cynical than he. Hall has a wonderful ear for dialogue; Stanley's exchanges with his client, his attorney, his wife, and the cops are so well crafted that they're often genuinely irritating to read--irritating in the way that real-life conversations so often are. A strange recommendation, perhaps, but a recommendation all the same. Thomas Gaughan

Hall's latest single-word title brings Stanley Hasting a client who believes he's being set up. All clues indeed point to Stanley's client, but only until the murders begin: then police blame Stanley. Sure to be in demand.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mysterious Pr
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0892966238
• ISBN 13: 9780892966233
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 309