Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Boiled Bludis, September 26, 2002
This review is from: The Big Switch: A Brian Kane Mystery (Brian Kane Mysteries) (Paperback)
Jack Bludis gives us a fast-paced, down and dirty ride through the mud puddles of post-war, pre-McCarthy Hollywood sleaze. The casting couch is all full up. Starlets are drugged and set up in smut shoots. Everybody's partying, boozing, and smoking, making movies, making money, and making each other. The studio morals clause is hanging over stellar heads and blackmail is the big easy. There's a switch inside every switch in this book until you hit the big one Bludis has set in a powerhouse of a denouement.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Double Trouble, November 19, 2001
This review is from: The Big Switch: A Brian Kane Mystery (Brian Kane Mysteries) (Paperback)
The Big Switch is a traditional mystery -- there's a murder, a somewhat hard-boiled private eye (Brian Kane) who sets out to solve it, and a number of suspects and theories he has to consider. When the killer tries to scare Kane off, he just digs in deeper. But there are two things that set this book apart from the crowd: the setting, 1950's Hollywood, which you can see and hear and feel as you read; and the role of sex, to which Kane is addicted. That he cares deeply about a call girl named Kitty -- who loves him, too, in her own way -- is fitting and often touching. But Kane and Kitty are not the only ones with an itch. The stars and starlets of Movieland are nothing if not prurient in their tastes, and a quality that could conceivably undo Kane in a different setting actually becomes an investigative asset here. In short, The Big Switch is a fun diversion into a setting which -- despite its rather loose social mores and the crimes that make this book a murder mystery -- seems a lot more innocent than our world today.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
1951 Hollywood: too much money, and too many secrets., November 7, 2001
This review is from: The Big Switch: A Brian Kane Mystery (Brian Kane Mysteries) (Paperback)
It seems lately that too many mystery writers are asking me to like characters who are stuck on themselves and their own wealth, totally obnoxious and ugly to even their friends-- or both! Not so with four terrific mysteries I've read in the last month: "The Big Switch" by Jack Bludis; "All White Girls" by Michael Bracken; "Voodoo That You Do" by Richard Helms; and "Pilikia is my Business" by Mark Troy. "The Big Switch" brings noir back in style with Brian Kane, Camel-smoking PI who's been hired to take photographs of Lester Randolph participating in one of his many extra-marital affairs. By page 25, Kane's discovered that his client is an imposter, the gun he took away from her had probably been used in a murder (but it doesn't matter, because someone's already stolen it from him!), and besides a cheating husband, he has to find a killer, because one-by-one, the young women linked to Randolph are winding up dead. A hard-boiled detective with a soft spot for young starlets? That's Kane, on the job until all the questions are answered.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
