Amazon.com Review
Satisfaction is a commodity in short supply for the myriad characters populating
Done for a Dime, private eye-turned-author David Corbett's affecting follow-up to his debut novel,
The Devil's Redhead. Among the significantly short-changed is Raymond "Strong" Carlisle, an irascible black saxophonist who used to play with the giants of blues music, but now does only about four gigs a year, "if he’s lucky, with a bunch of sorry old men the business forgot long ago." When Carlisle is shot dead at his home in Rio Mirada, an increasingly crime-plagued burg north of San Francisco, the cops, including lead detective Dennis Murchison and his racist partner, Jerry Stluka, figure it's the tragic result of a nightclub fight he'd provoked the evening before. Their two prime suspects: Arlie Thigpen, a gang tough employed by a local drug dealer; and Toby Marchand, Carlisle's musician son, who'd chafed under his elder's incessant tauntings, and whose white teenage lover, Nadya Lazarenko, witnessed the homicide--but is too traumatized to remember anything about it. However, Carlisle's death is merely a harbinger of worse troubles to come, among them a neighborhood-destroying fire engineered by greedy developers.
Regrettably, that cinematic hillside conflagration diverts attention from Corbett's more interesting study of people trying to cope with the inequitable vicissitudes of life. Murchison, for instance, comes off as a conflicted mix of determination and desperation, a man terminally unable to fulfill the expectations of his wife and parents. For Marchand, the challenge is to reject his late father's cynicism and find hope in Nadya's embrace, even as she refuses to trust in something so ephemeral as happiness. Other well-formed players here--from a suspect's strong-willed mother, to a smart and fetching lawyer who confuses Murchison's heart, to a cop-turned-hired killer who isn't so transparently evil as he initially appears--struggle to achieve their own forms of justice in an unjust world. Corbett has a sharp ear for street dialogue and an even sharper understanding of human emotion and pain. For a book that's all about dissatisfaction, Done for a Dime is decidedly satisfying. --J. Kingston Pierce
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Corbett (The Devil's Redhead) again uses some of the traditional tools of genre fiction in bold new ways in his sharp and exceptionally poignant second suspense novel. The feeling of a community under siege-in this case, a shabby but lively multiracial town called Rio Mirada, just north of San Francisco-comes straight from Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, as concerned citizens and families trying to live decently come under attack from the forces of organized greed. There's a touch of Jim Thompson in the main villain, a hired thug calling himself Richard Ferry, who turns out not to be quite as detestable as he first appears. And Ross Macdonald might have created the head cop, a local detective named Murchison, who isn't as smart or as liberal as Macdonald's PI Lew Archer but nevertheless has aspirations to similar levels of achievement and humanity. The story begins with the murder of cantankerous black jazz musician Raymond "Strong" Carlisle, shot down in his front yard. Murchison and his racist partner, Stluka, have two suspects: Carlisle's son, also a talented jazzman, and a local gang member who is lucky enough to have a tough and resourceful mother to defend him. Corbett introduces such a large cast of characters in this sweeping narrative (including the cameo return of ex-con Dan Abatangelo from The Devil's Redhead) that some of them don't get enough time on stage. But the ones that do will linger in readers' thoughts for a long time.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
