Synopsis
"Peekaboo" Frankie Fagen is a long-haired, leather-jacketed private detective, best known for his unconventional methods and the Norton Commando he rides through his beloved San Francisco. When summoned to a box at the opera, he meets the beautiful Colleen Farragut, due to go on trial the next day for the murder of her husband, the city's richest and most powerful real estate developer and a lifelong Fagen nemesis. A million-dollar bonus is Frankie's if he finds the burglars Colleen claims were the actual killers - but the real prize would be a century's worth of Farragut diaries that document a family tradition of criminal activity and corruption.
With evidence and public sentiment stacked against his client, Frankie, motivated by both love and revenge, races against the clock to find the killer and save Colleen.
Reviews
Arresting San Francisco images and a flashy narrative style launch this mystery debut with a strength that is later weakened by cliches. PI Frank Fagen, a fourth-generation San Franciscan and a former cop, receives an opera ticket and an anonymous invitation to that night's performance of Carmen. Dressed in a leather and satin tux, Frankie rides to the opera house on his vintage Norton bike and meets Colleen Farragut, the drop-dead gorgeous widow--and accused murderer--of real-estate developer William Farragut, one of the principals in Frankie's disgraced departure from the SFPD. Frankie agrees to investigate the case, which is about to go to trial, hoping for a peek at the dead man's diaries and a hefty fee. His sleuthing uncovers an alleged burglary at the Farraguts' Presidio mansion and two missing 14th-century Italian silver plates, some kinky sex involving Farragut with hookers and an affair between Colleen and a city bigshot. Dalessandro's energetic prose and stylish inventions are defeated by the cardboard characterization of Colleen, whose beauty, brilliance and magnetism, while central to the action, are never made credible.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Foiled in generations of his family's attempts to get the goods on those thieving San Francisco developers the Farraguts--culminating in his dismissal from the police force after he's accused William Farragut IV of conniving in the murder of the gay mayor--p.i. Frankie Fagen gets some revenge when Farragut's murdered, and a shot at still more when the alluring widow Colleen hires him to find evidence that will get her off the hook--and in the process spring a hundred years' worth of self-incriminating Farragut diaries from legal limbo. Frankie lunges at the job with the fury of a chain saw--tracking down the bondage queen Farragut was seeing, uncovering endless conspiracies between Farragut and the boys (and girls) downtown, getting evidence that Colleen's own lawyer is setting his client up, and, of course, falling hard for the client, who ``kissed better than most women make love.'' A low-calorie, proletarian Presumed Innocent that packs an incredible amount of detection, suspense, and fireworks into a tiny package. Only the lumbering, predictable denouement of this first novel is off the pace. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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