Now, in CHAINED (Three Rivers, paper, $12.95), Sam shows up on the set of a BBC-TV production as stunt double for a birdbrained actress who ruffles the fur of animal rights activists - prime suspects when Sam is mistakenly kidnapped and shackled in a basement dungeon. What do you do with her? So far in this brash series, Lauren Henderson has found a place for her hedonistic sleuth, Sam Jones, in London S-and-M clubs, in an avant-garde British theater company and in New York's trendy art scene. So your heroine is an outrageously hip, voraciously sexy young sculptor with a taste for kinky experiences and a knack for getting into trouble. While his eerie sketches of the imagined murder scene suggest the otherworldly beauty Bayer is after, the woozy storytelling fails to convey the mystery lady's seductive charms, which seem cheap and vulgar and a bit ridiculous. Like his father, who was Barbara's analyst, David is mesmerized by a photograph of her (titled ''Woman With a Whip'') and enthralled by her dreams. The artist's obsession gives him a voyeur's peek into the lurid life and scandalous death of Barbara Fulraine, a married socialite who was shot to death, presumably by her mobster boyfriend, in the sleazy motel room where she was trysting with another, younger lover. As it stands, the narrative is too grounded in sordid reality for its arty narrative style. Given the issues it raises about the truth of art and the validity of memory - not to mention its claustrophobic point of view, dreamlike scene shifts and highly charged eroticism - the story is one that might better have been told by David Hunt, the pseudonym Bayer uses for such moody pieces.
#Books like the hider by loren d. estleman trial#
William Bayer's psychological thriller THE DREAM OF THE BROKEN HORSES (Pocket Books, $25) takes a young forensic artist named David Weiss back to his Midwestern hometown, ostensibly to cover a murder trial but in reality to investigate an unsolved double-homicide case that has haunted him since his boyhood. His voice is truer when he speaks for people on humbler turf, for the long-distance truckers, battered wives, frightened children and exhausted social workers Walker knows best. Walker knows that ''we're not talking about toothpick money'' but it takes a couple of killings, some savage beatings and the kidnapping of the industrialist's great-grandson before he gets the message.Įstleman compromises his lean, tough style when he starts preaching about the generations of greed and corruption that contributed to the decline of his beloved city, and the scenes of violence into which he channels his anger are overwrought. Everyone but Walker can see that he's being set up for a double cross when this young temptress asks him to trace her late husband's illegitimate progeny so they can share the wealth. Estleman's SINISTER HEIGHTS (Mysterious Press/ Warner, $24.95) when he hires himself out to the widow of one of the old robber barons who built Detroit and left it in the hands of civic leaders who are busy tearing it down. Walker's proletarian values get a workout in Loren D.
#Books like the hider by loren d. estleman code#
''Knowing the vocabulary doesn't mean you speak the language,'' according to Amos Walker, one of the last and most durable of those throwback private eyes who still smoke, drink and use the hard-boiled lingo in defense of a code of ethics that went out with the stick shift. Adrift''), I kept fantasizing that he would stagger into a bar, buy a round of drinks, tell his sad story and pick up a posse of righteous angry men to even up the cruel match. Although he is drawn as a hapless loser (''I am all alone, Ricky thought. But the extent to which Starks initially submits to his punishment is absurd. Once Katzenbach allows Starks to develop a backbone, this one-sided torture turns into a clever reversal of the old cat-and-mouse game. But the shrink is no match for his persecutor, and he is soon stripped of his assets and professionally discredited. offers his victim the dubious assistance of encoded clues and two untrustworthy guides, one of whom calls herself Virgil and presents herself in the buff.
Starks has 15 days to identify his tormentor and the source of his grievance, or else commit suicide - unless he is willing to have some blameless relative die in his stead. On his 53rd birthday, a stodgy Manhattan psychoanalyst named Frederick Starks is given a life-or-death challenge by a cunning psychopath calling himself Rumplestiltskin. Despite its sluggish start and bloated length, John Katzenbach's psychological thriller THE ANALYST (Ballantine, $25) redeems itself through the sheer sadism of its premise.
0 kommentar(er)
