'The best private eye novel written by a woman' - Bill Pronzini
Sorry, Bill - no dice. If they hadn't put your blurb on the front cover I would have approached this with normal expectations and probably quite enjoyed it, but you spoilt it for me. 'Best private eye novel written by a woman'. Fatuous, patronising, and wrong, all at the same time! As Nero Wolfe would say, Pfui!
Jim Sader is a Long Beach PI who takes on a job for elderly Hale Gibbings. Gibbings has received an anonymous note claiming a small boy is being tormented. The boy has connections with the Gibbings family, so he wants Sader to look into it -- discreetly. And the first step is to find the boy.
The usual trail of leads follows. Sader tracks the boy's adopted mother via friends, contacts, real estate salesmen... One promising lead is murdered; another gets ideas of his own and mounts a rival investigation. It could have been written by any competent author, male or female -- until the last few chapters, when Sader gets all noble and heroic, finds his faith and declines to take a fee. That's not the way to run a business, Sader. The boy is found, and the denoument is a big Freudian anti-climax. Ho hum.
As I said, it's fine up till then. Sader is a little too eager to explain to us what he (and we) missed in his earlier conversations -- still, nobody's perfect. But the end just fizzles.
And by the way, there's no sleep, no slander - so where the heck does the title come from?
Get real, Bill. This is adequate, that's all.
Jon.
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