Half The Truth (Signed First Edition)

When his estranged wife, Cass, shows up with Sharon Cooper, an uncommonly attractive woman who's getting death threats over the phone, how can Chicago private eye Malachy P. Foley turn down the case? For once, Cass has brought him a client who can pay. And besides, maybe Mal can get Cass to come back home.
Mal learns that the true object of the caller's interest is Sharon's brother, Jason, a promising college basketball player who's hampered by a bad attitude. The problem is, Jason has disappeared, and Mal can't help Sharon until he finds the missing athlete. Following a trail that leads to murder, Mal races to find Jason before the caller does. But when Mal succeeds, why is no one, not even Jason, willing to tell him the whole truth? Finally, when both Sharon and Cass are kidnapped, Mal is given a terrible ultimatum: to save the women, he must send Jason to his death.

Chicago PI Malachy Foley is often too cute for comfort, what with his BMW motorcycle and his titled landlady and his part-time job playing jazz piano in a bar. While many series writers can make their atmospheric touches work effectively for many books, Walker comes close to wearing out this series' distinguishing marks in only the second entry (following last year's Edgar nominee Fixed in His Folly). On the other hand, his prose is lively, and Foley, with a mouth as quick as his hands, has some interesting edges. Here, Foley is hired by the sister of Jason Cooper, a talented college basketball player who's gone missing. Jason's coach doesn't know where he is; neither does a local crime boss on whom Foley often relies for information. It seems that Jason is on the run. But from whom? And why are people associated with him coming to untimely ends? Some dogged pursuit, characterized by a bit more guts than brains, leads Foley to Jason, and he soon finds himself hiding the kid, who either doesn't know or won't tell who is out to get him and why. But then Cass, the estranged wife Foley is desperately trying to win back, is kidnapped, along with Jason's sister, a switcheroo that puts the PI in a bit of a moral dilemma. Walker's twisty plot and moments of genuine wit are enough to make up for the bouts of cuteness.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Where, oh where has violinist Sharon Cooper's wayward brother Jason gone? Deep underground, if he's got any sense. The basketball prospect's gone AWOL from Cragman Community College just as Sharon's getting a series of quietly menacing phone calls ordering her to produce him--and since she can't, she runs to Malachy Foley, the suspended lawyer whose debut (Fixed in His Folly, 1995) showed such unusual range and reach. No such luck this time. Oh, Mal does the job all right, since the kidnapping of his client and his sometime wife Cass gives him the just right motivation to divine that media sex lord Breaker Hanafan is bound to know something about the kid's disappearance; to trace Jason to the home of his former (make that late) high-school basketball coach; and to link Jason's hiding act to the, uh, accidental deaths of his roommate and his girlfriend just a few weeks earlier. But as the outlines of the secret in Jason's unwilling possession come into focus--it's got something to do with US Attorney nominee Calvin Radcliffe, the evidence is two sheets of paper Jason's socked away somewhere, and an awful lot of Chicago hoods are willing to go the extra mile to get those two flimsy sheets--you find yourself getting impatient waiting for Mal to figure out what the writing on those fatal papers means, and hoping there'll be more to the case. There is, but not nearly enough. Altogether more routine than Walker's first, though resourceful Mal shows some nifty moves with a parking ticket, a length of plumber's pipe, and the current issue of Good Housekeeping. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Malachy Foley, a disbarred Chicago attorney working as a private investigator, is encouraged by his estranged wife, Cass, to accept Sharon Cooper's case. Sharon is a renowned classical musician being threatened if she doesn't reveal the location of her missing brother, Jason, a prodigy in his own right but on the basketball court. Foley's Chicago underworld connections tell him that Jason Cooper is a hot property--for unknown reasons. When Foley travels to Wisconsin to interview the kid's high-school coach, he discovers the man is dead. It seems that Cooper's disappearance is also related to the death of another young athlete three months earlier. The second Mal Foley novel is very entertaining reading. Foley is a likable protagonist with a sharp tongue and enough "tough" to back it up; his lifestyle is quirky but not unbelievably so; and the Chicago ambience will provide readers with a real taste of the Windy City and its surrounding area. Here's hoping Foley has a lot more adventures in his case file. Wes Lukowsky