Oh No, Not My Baby (Bloodlines) - Softcover

Russell James

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1899344535 ISBN 13: 9781899344536

Publisher: Do Not Pr, 2000

Synopsis

James has a way with characters. Few are precisely what they seem, and our desire to learn who they really are and what actually happened makes this one a page-turner"" - Booklist. It should have been a dream come true. Nick Chance fancied her at school but nothing ever came of it. Six years later they meet up. This time she wants him. Nick plays sax in a band, Babette went on to college and became embroiled in animal rights issues. The nightmare begins when Nick agrees to drive her to a meat processing plant where she intends to get photographic evidence of what goes on inside, only she doesn't come out again. Nick's quest to find out what happened to Babette leads him into a dark and complex labyrinth in which heroes become villains and villains are still villains. As Nick probes ever deeper, the story of what really happened to Babette-and why-becomes horrifyingly clear. Russell James has been called a ""British crime poet of lost souls and grey streets"" (Time Out). He is known for hard-hitting, low-life thrillers, mainly set in southeast London, though this new novel is set in and around the city of Bristol.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

British author James (Count Me Out, etc.) usually writes noir that reaches down low and comes up with all kinds of unsettling images, but here his main focus--the animal rights movement--just isn't dark enough to please. Sax player Nick Chance falls for Babette Hendry, the school beauty he once fancied from afar, when she comes on to him at a gig in Bath. Now an animal rights activist, Babette persuades Nick to sit in her car outside a Bristol meat-processing plant while she goes inside to take pictures. She never comes out, apparently having died in an accident involving a meat pulverizer. After being questioned at the local police station, Nick returns home to find what appear to be two plainclothes policemen searching his flat. Meanwhile, a couple of ecoterrorists roam the country, attacking scientists, terrorizing abortion clinics and otherwise causing mayhem. Nick later learns that the manager of the meat-processing factory was in love with Babette, and that she once worked for a mysterious company marketing health products. James is adept at revealing his characters' motives as good or bad, then playfully subverting them. Besides exploring the morality of animal rights, here he gets in a few licks at corporate sponsorship, charitable organizations and quasireligious self-help programs with their gurulike leaders. But Nick is never in enough real danger to maximize suspense, and an important twist near the book's end misfires. This novel, finally, is more gray than noir. (Mar.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

All sax player Nick Chance has is his music, but that's enough--until he sees Babette again. She had been an unapproachable queen in school, smart and beautiful. Now she's back, and Nick is in love. So, seemingly, is she. But she's also a zealous animal-rights activist, and she convinces Nick to drive her to a meat-processing plant she hopes to expose. While he waits for her in the dark parking lot, ambulances and police arrive. By dawn, he learns that she has been killed in a monstrous machine that pulverizes carcasses and that police and a clutch of creepy corporate thugs and shadowy ecoterrorists are anxious to talk to him. Their presumptions about his involvement, the possibility that Babette was pushed into the pulverizer, and his grief over losing her force the normally diffident musician to search for the truth. Author James has a way with characters. Few are precisely what they seem, and our desire to learn who they really are and what actually happened makes this one a page-turner. Thomas Gaughan

About this edition

• Publisher: Do Not Pr
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1899344535
• ISBN 13: 9781899344536
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240