Hell's Kitchen (Location Scout) [Paperback]

Jeffery Deaver (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 4, 2001 | Series: Location Scout

Every New York City neighbourhood has a story, but what John Pellam uncovers in Hell's Kitchen has a darkness all its own. The Hollywood location scout is hoping to capture the unvarnished memories of longtime Kitchen residents in a no-budget documentary film. But when a suspicious fire ravages an elderly woman's crumbling tenement, Pellam realises that someone might want the past to stay buried. As more buildings and lives go up in flames, Pellam takes to the streets, seeking the twisted pyromaniac who sells services to the highest bidder. But Pellam is unaware that the fires are merely flickering preludes to the arsonist's ultimate masterpiece - a conflagration of nearly unimaginable proportion ...

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Perennial bestselling author Jeffrey Deaver's alter ego, William Jefferies, knows a thing or two about Hollywood. So does John Pellam, the hero of his previous Shallow Graves and Bloody River Blues and the latest in the series, Hell's Kitchen. Pellam made a name for himself as a director before a stint in San Quentin took him off the fast track. Since his release he's been earning his keep as a location scout and not so incidentally shooting a documentary about New York's Hell's Kitchen, which he hopes will propel him back into the career that skidded south after he ran afoul of the law.

Pellam has found the star of his new film, one Ettie Washington, who has lived in the neighborhood for decades and is the perfect voice to tell the story of an area that's losing its old-time seediness to urban gentrification. But then Ettie's tenement goes up in a blaze that kills a small boy and puts her right in the public eye--as a suspect. It's only the beginning of a series of fires, each one more deadly. The cops know Ettie couldn't have set the others, since she's been in jail, but they're convinced she knows who did. Pellam has his own reasons for getting Ettie off the hook and embarking on a search for the real pyromaniac. Jeffries saves the best one for the very end of this taut, well-paced, and highly atmospheric thriller. --Jane Adams --This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Edgar Award-nominated Deaver (Bloody River Blues, etc.) exposes the brutal side of the Big Apple as John Pellam, a former Hollywood location scout, takes to the streets of Hell's Kitchen to film a documentary. Pellam is on his way to check on one of his interviewees, an elderly woman named Ettie, when he smells smoke and sees flames engulfing Ettie's tenement. Unfortunately, Pellam can't get near her fifth floor apartment, and she jumps out the window to land on a pile of trash bags. Pellam soon finds that Ettie is the prime suspect in the arson; she's kept in prison after another resident dies of injuries suffered in the fire. In an attempt to exonerate Ettie and uncover the true culprit who has been lighting fires around the city, Pellam ends up talking to some unnecessarily grouchy detectives, fire investigators and local thugs. Despite the ethnic mix of characters that populate this gritty mystery, readers may find that some of the details are overly gruesome (e.g., the arsonist's description of burning bodies) and Pellam's character is lacking in charisma. In addition, his extreme dedication to this one old woman merely because he's interviewed her seems less than plausible. (Feb.)Forecast: It's notable that this is an original Deaver novel, a fresh addition to a series that's been reprinted by Pocket and was written before the author became a near-household name with his Lincoln Rhyme novels. With Deaver's name on the cover, and with booksellers explaining to fans that it's a new item, the book should score big.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Coronet (August 4, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0340818808
• ISBN-13: 978-0340818800
• Product Dimensions: 4.4 x 1 x 7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,061,530 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Final Pellam Novel Is Great!, January 28, 2001

By 

Brad Stonecipher - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hell's Kitchen (Mass Market Paperback)

"Hell's Kitchen" is Jeffery Deaver's last novel in the John Pellam series. "Shallow Graves" and "Bloody River Blues" were the first two in the series. "Hell's Kitchen" is not a re-published novel like the other two, it is brand new novel, published in 2001! It was my second favorite novel out of the three. John Pellam is in Hell's Kitchen, New York, making a documentary about the people there. He meets many interesting people including Ettie Washington. Ettie agrees to meet with John again for another interview, but when John gets to her apartment building, a fire erupts out of the basement. John, Ettie, and the other tenants barely escape in time. The police and fire marshal believe that Ettie hired someone to burn down the apartment building because of Ettie's new insurance policy. Ettie goes to jail. The arsonist is on the run burning subway trains, hotels, hospitals, stores, lawyer firms, killing many people in his way. John Pellam must capture this crazy arsonist and prove Ettie's innocense with the help of gang members, punks, and powerful construction builders, before Hell's Kitchen burns into hell. If you read the first two Pellam novels, then you cannot miss this one!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The Heat Is On, March 27, 2001

By 

sweetmolly (RICHMOND, VA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hell's Kitchen (Mass Market Paperback)

The amiable John Pellam is back in his third outing, this time filming an oral history of the Hell's Kitchen area of New York City. His centerpiece is Ettie Washington, a 72 year-old black lady who narrates colorful stories from her checkered past all spent in a five-block area of Hell's Kitchen. A suspicious fire erupts in her tenement injuring her and burns the building to the ground. Arson is suspected and Ettie is the suspect in chief.

Deaver sets the mood of the neighborhood and skillfully sketches some interesting characters. The history is presented in a lively manner (have fun while you learn). The dark humor breaks out in a sneaky manner when you least expect it. That's the good news.

The bad news is the story lacks focus and consequently does not have tension. There are too many aimless threads. Though Pellam's goal is to find the arsonist and get Effie out of jail, many of the paths he takes have nothing to do with her. I felt as if I were traveling from NYC to Washington DC via Denver and Omaha. There are corporate high jinks, yards of bureaucratic red tape, and worst of all a prevailing pessimism that it really isn't important whether Effie is innocent or not.

The last 30 pages are pure Deaver. He twists and turns, the good guys have feet of clay, the villains are actually heroic. You think the action is over, but wait! That was only a prelude to even greater action. No one can set a finale like Deaver. The problem was getting there.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not ready for Kindle, January 5, 2011

By 

Christopher Jones - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hell's Kitchen (Location Scout Mysteries) (Kindle Edition)

The novel itself was fine. Compared to the earlier John Pellam stories, this was more like the Jeffery Deaver books that got me hooked in the first place.

What was truly disappointing was the Kindle version. It appears that somebody just took a printed copy of the novel, scanned it with OCR (optical character recognition) and hoped for the best. There are the obvious misinterpretations of scanned text ("die" when it should be "the") along with poor spacing all around. Section breaks are left out, so you're all of a sudden in a different time or place without a break in the flow to clue you in. Even new paragraphs are indented just the tiniest sliver, so it's often hard to follow a simple conversation without the visual cues. A quick read by a 10-year-old with a high-lighter could have corrected most of the flaws, but clearly the publisher was just looking to fill up digital pages at seven bucks a pop.

P. S. "Bloody River Blues" is just as poorly formatted.