Deadfall, by Bill Pronzini
Oct. 27th, 2010 12:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aI hadn't read a "Nameless Detective" book for about a year, but I thought Deadfall, the next in the series, would be a good, light book to read on the train up to Sacramento (and I indeed read the first several chapters then and the next several while K. napped that evening).
I was very pleased to see that this was a good old fashioned mystery with lots of characters and lots of clues to what was going. Almost too many in some cases, as I figured out the first murder almost as soon as it was introduced, but fortunately there were other murders and disappearances to keep me going.
This was all a very nice change from Pronzini's locked-room mysteries of other recent books.
As I've said before, Pronzini isn't nearly as good of a writer as his wife, Marcia Muller, but this one did have some interesting character development: particularly in the fact that Nameless is considering retiring at the end of the book. That's always been a problem that Pronzini was going to face, in making his protagonist 20 years older than himself. I'll be interested in seeing where he goes with it ... probably next year.
Edit: But he can't be thinking about it too seriously, as there are another 21 books after this one!
I was very pleased to see that this was a good old fashioned mystery with lots of characters and lots of clues to what was going. Almost too many in some cases, as I figured out the first murder almost as soon as it was introduced, but fortunately there were other murders and disappearances to keep me going.
This was all a very nice change from Pronzini's locked-room mysteries of other recent books.
As I've said before, Pronzini isn't nearly as good of a writer as his wife, Marcia Muller, but this one did have some interesting character development: particularly in the fact that Nameless is considering retiring at the end of the book. That's always been a problem that Pronzini was going to face, in making his protagonist 20 years older than himself. I'll be interested in seeing where he goes with it ... probably next year.
Edit: But he can't be thinking about it too seriously, as there are another 21 books after this one!