Hoping to start over after kicking a heroin addiction, Munch Mancini flees Venice Beach when she becomes a suspect in the shooting death of her abusive father, but she must return for a dangerous showdown in order to move on with her life."
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Kirkus Reviews
As far as the Venice PD is concerned, the murder of lowlife dealer ``Flower George'' Mancini is a clear case of AVA, NHI- -``asshole versus asshole, no human involved.'' So it's no big deal when Mancini's daughter Munch, the chief suspect in his killing, gives Sgt. Mace St. John the slip and disappears into the San Fernando Valley. But when the gun that shot Mancini is linked to a grisly series of dismemberments, Mace wishes he'd paid closer attention to Munch's moves while he had the chance. Even though he squeezes some personal details of her horrible life (her father got her hooked and repeatedly sold her for drugs) out of her attractive probation officer, he has no way of tracing her to Happy Jack's Auto Repair, where she's working as a lippy mechanic and assiduously building the new paper trail that'll bury her old identity for good. While Mace is wrestling with his own father's problems--a series of strokes have left Digger St. John sadly addled--another break in the case links the killings to a deadly, penicillin-resistant strain of gonorrhea, and puts Mace on Munch's trail once again. But does he really want to catch this gamine druggie when she's finding Jesus, going to NA meetings, and working wonders on the cars at Happy Jack's? Munch's scenes pulse with such startling immediacy--she's definitely worth another round, even if kindly, sensitive Mace never returns--that first-timer Seranella makes you forget how familiar her story is. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
There's a scene in NO HUMAN INVOLVED, Barbara Seranella's richly mordant first mystery, where a tough former druggie and prostitute named Munch Mancini is about to start a valve job on a Dodge. 'Finally, she was satisfied that all the bolts that held the cylinder heads to the block were out and all the other accessories safely out of the way ..... This was where, she always thought, being strong could work against you. Better to be smart and have to think the job through, rather than to be a bull who tore things apart ...' Seranella learned about valve jobs by working for 20 years at a Texaco station in the Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood, where many of her regular customers were familiar faces from movies and television. Where she learned to write is another story: there are no schools that teach you how to create perfect characters like Munch or Mace St. John, the LAPD homicide detective who thinks Munch shot her abusive father. Even non mystery fans will be hooked by Seranella's evocative writing: scenes such as the one between St. John and his father, an Alzheimer's sufferer, confirm that this author is one to watch out for. -- Dick Adler
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A scintillating first effort,
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This review is from: No Human Involved (Mass Market Paperback)
Author Barbara Saranella's first novel, NO HUMAN INVOLVED, is an exceptional debut. In it, we have "Munch" Mancini, a street wise, world weary, over-the-top-cynical ex-prostitute and recovering heroin addict, hiding from both a brutal biker and Mace St. John, the latter a street wise and world weary cop investigating a series of murders in the Los Angeles of the 70's. Munch is a prime suspect in one of the slayings. She's also a crackerjack auto mechanic, a skill she utilizes to bring in a paycheck while she lies low. As for Mace, he lives in a lovingly restored, 1927-vintage Pullman car parked on a spur of unused Southern Pacific track in an unprepossessing part of town. In so many works of this genre, the author attempts to create sympathetic characters, apparently using some arcane formula that only results in very two-dimensional personae. I can't tell you how many crime thrillers I've finished not caring one iota about the story's hero(es). Somehow, in her first time out, Saranella manages to transcend this trap, creating in Munch and Mace people I cared about from the very first page. This is so refreshing! The plot of NO HUMAN INVOLVED is revealed to the reader in a manner as smooth and sharp as a scalpel's incision lays open the inside of a cadaver during an autopsy. There's even a bit of humor and pathos along the way in Mace's relationship with a new girlfriend, and with his aging father, the latter suffering a mental deterioration following several strokes. The manner in which Mace acquires two dogs near the book's conclusion is particularly amusing. The story's end involves a satisfying plot twist. Judging from subsequent releases by the same author, Munch is to be the central character in a continuing series. Bravo! I, for one, immediately added Saranella's two latest books to my Wish List.
12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
More authentic on auto mechanics than dialog,
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This review is from: No Human Involved (Mass Market Paperback)
It is great writing and I pulled an all-nighter until I'd finished it. Wonderful technical detail, from botany to cars. The dialog is not Elmore Leonard standard. No drug-addicted prostitute I have ever known (and I've known a few) ever expressed herself in such terms as "hypothetically speaking couldn't the information the police sought be obtained over the phone." I liked finding that a witty and hard-boiled crime writer included a few decent, helpful, effective, and even sincerely religious, characters.
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Strange but satisfying,
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This review is from: No Human Involved (Mass Market Paperback)
I didn't enjoy the 70s, and if I'd picked up earler that this story was set in 1977 urban Southern California, I probably would have given it a pass. A fortunate mistake.Not that Seranella makes me feel nostalgic. If anything, she paints a bleaker picture than I remember. An asphalt lanscape, populated with self-satisfied, bigoted Angelenos, burned out junkies, cynical cops... And yet she forces us to acknowledge a certain strange beauty in this landscape, where strangers, or even enemies, casually help each other out, or a tough garage owner starts a garden in his parking lot, because he can't bear to uproot a struggling tree. Then there's a cop who ignores orders to stop working on a horrifying serial murder -- but still finds time to look after an aging father and restore the old Pullman rail car he lifes in. And most of all there's Munch. Junkie, prostitute, thief. The useless scum referred to in the title? Yes and no. Because she's also a genius -- a wizard at fixing cars, a savant who drinks up the contents of books the way ordinary people drink water. The best parts of this book are about her struggles. With addiction -- which she imagines to be an alter ego, whispering in her ear, "just a taste". With a life stacked against her. With an appalling sense of herself, that horrifying personal dissociation you see in survivors of abuse. And in the end, she's the one who saves the day with a momentous, heroic act.
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