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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Nobody knew anybody, when you got right down to it.", June 8, 2008
This review is from: Fever: A Nameless Detective Novel (Nameless Detective Novels) (Hardcover)
Bill Pronzini's "Fever" is about the compulsions that drive people to the edge--and occasionally straight over. The Nameless Detective (whose first name we now know is Bill) is in his sixties and semi-retired. He runs a San Francisco-based private investigation agency along with his partner, Tamara Corbin. His best investigator is the morose workaholic Jake Runyon, a former cop for the Seattle PD and a man in deep mourning since the death of his beloved wife, Colleen. Known as "Bloodhound Jake," Runyon's "instincts were sharper, his tenacity greater" than anyone Bill has ever encountered; he works long hours to avoid the unbearable loneliness of his empty apartment. Jake and his colleagues will need all of their investigative skills to solve the difficult problems that lie ahead.
The first case involves thirty-three year old Janice Krochek, a high-strung woman who has a history of disappearing repeatedly from her million-dollar Oakland Hills home. Janice's fever is Internet gambling and she's got it bad. Now she has vanished again, and her exasperated and self-centered husband, Mitchell, hires Bill's firm to find her. Jake locates Janice; Bill and Tamara confront her about her high-stakes gambling. In addition, they can't help but notice that in an effort to get her hands on even more money, Janice has come into contact with some extremely sleazy individuals. She refuses to accept the fact that her compulsive gambling is a sickness that needs treatment. To her it's "the sweetest high there is...the action, the excitement...there's nothing else like it." Even though Mitch claims that he wants her to return home, Janice adamantly refuses to come back.
Runyon's next client is Rose Youngblood, a widowed black woman in her fifties who works in a college admissions office and is active in her church and community. Rose wants the agency to find out why her twenty-six year old son, Brian, has suddenly undergone a radical personality change. She insists that Brian always had good values, held down a steady job, and seemed to have a bright future. Recently, he has begun to behave secretively and is frequently agitated. Furthermore, someone beat him up badly and he stubbornly refuses to identify the perpetrator. After looking into Brian's finances, Runyon learns that the young man has gone deeply into in debt. What caused Brian's abrupt transformation?
Jake's life is further complicated by an encounter with a deformed woman who hides half her face with a scarf. He rescues her from some teenaged bullies and subsequently looks into her good eye and sees something that makes him empathize with her: pain "raw and naked, the kind that goes marrow-deep, soul deep." Jake wants to get to know this woman better; connecting with someone who understands suffering as he does might help him heal his own wounds.
Bill Pronzini has a smooth, no-frills writing style marked by sharply-written dialogue and changes in point of view (first person when Bill is speaking, third person in Tamara and Jake's chapters). Pronzini knows San Francisco intimately, and during the many interviews that he and his colleagues conduct in various parts of the city, he brings the people and streets of San Francisco to vibrant life. This is not a feel-good novel. As the detectives close in on the answers they seek, they make some shocking discoveries. "Fever" is a gritty and horrifying look at the inexplicable obsessions that overtake people, with tragic results.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well Done Mystery, January 29, 2010
Bill Pronzini's novel, Fever, features his Nameless Detective and partners working on another pair of crimes. This has been Pronzini's format for the series for a while now, and it's really effective. The author concentrates more on telling interesting mysteries against the fabric of real life, and creating organic detective that grow from book to book.
This one starts out interestingly, with Nameless and his partner Tamara picking up the trail of Janice Krochek, a wife gone missing. Jake Runyon, their field operative, has tracked the woman down. I liked the way Pronzini sets up the encounter and explains the laws of tracking down adults. A private eye can't just bag and tag an adult that's willingly gone missing. Adults have the right to disappear and not come home any time they want to.
Janice Krochek's addiction to gambling shows up on page one and maintains the addiction theme of the novel throughout. Normally in a Nameless novel there's a client or someone Nameless meets that deserves rooting on. In Fever, though, Nameless doesn't care much for Janice Krochek or her husband Mitch. However, both of these characters - slaves to their own addictions - are very true to life. Pronzini writes the characters lean and mean, pared to the bone, but the story echoes and provides food for thought.
As soon as Nameless believes he's out of the Janice tracking business, she shows back up at his agency after someone has beaten her up. She claims that her life is in danger. Nameless takes her back to her husband, but it's clear that he's not as happy about having her back as he'd thought he would be. I had a lot of mixed feelings about this ending, but thankfully Pronzini doesn't let the story end there, because it suddenly takes on more dangerous and mysterious overtones.
In the meantime, Jake Runyon gets involved with a pro bono case of his own that Tamara has undertaken for the agency. Brian Youngblood's life has suddenly turned inside out and his mother wants to know why. Jake's investigation put him into the path of Bryn Darby, a woman who becomes part of the Nameless canon in later books. I had read about Bryn in other books, and now I'm glad I got to find out how they first met and what drew them together. Jake is one of those interesting, wounded characters that are fun to follow.
The Krochek case turns violent when Mitch calls Nameless in and shows him all the blood smeared throughout his house. I was pretty certain that Mitch had murdered his wife at that point, but Nameless takes the case on again to find out what happened. I knew I was in for a rollercoaster ride and looked forward to it.
Pronzini has been writing this private detective series for forty years and I've been reading them almost as long. Although I've figured out most of the author's moves during that time, he can still fool me and throw a curveball that catches me looking. The twist at the end of Fever is a great one.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
After reading almost all of the nameless books, this entry is good, but not the best, August 24, 2009
I started collecting the Nameless series a few years ago. Its a great series with evolving characters not stuck in a place, situation, or time period. "Fever" is comprised of two stories and primarily engages in the lives of three protagonists: Nameless (the detective this series has been following and whom is now sliding into retirement of a sort), Tamara (nameless' partner, Tamara sits in the office and does the computer work while holding the office together), and Jake Runyon (an ex cop who has been in a funk for several years since his second wife died).
One thing thats nice about this series is that from one novel to the next, you will be given different stylistic authorship approaches. Pronzini likes to try his hand at either exploring his own boundaries or those of other authors. Here in "Fever", Pronzini takes a generous helping from the 70's work of Ed McBain and his 87th precinct stories. I say this because McBain would often during this period break his stories into two parts, both of these were very simple small mysteries, and use the pages to explore his characters who would wax philosophically on a myriad of topics.
What you get with Fever, is not a very complicated or hard hitting entry into this series. You will follow the great protagonists from situation to situation as they think about life in general. The story gets its title "fever" from the addiction of one of its hard luck characters who has a gambling 'fever'. An addiction so strong that she would do basically anything to get one more online hand to play with.
Several of Pronzini's books over the last 10 years have consistently been on the extraordinary side of things. I would not mix Fever in with those. And thus I am stripping it of one star. That aside, this is an enjoyable book and I would say the series is alive and well.
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