Customer Reviews

Sentinels

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The Sentinels was my first exposure to Pronzini's "Nameless detective" novels. "Nameless" narrates the story without revealing his name. His namelessness is neither here nor there unlike Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name" movies and neither adds nor subtracts from the telling of the story which, in itself, is a fair detective novel.

In The Sentinels, the narrator travels to Northern California to investigate the disappearance of a college girl. While in the small town where she was last seen, he runs afoul of the locals and a group known as The Sentinels that may or may not have caused the girl's disappearance. Who was the girl travelling with? Why would anyone want to harm her? These questions make for an excellent mystery and needless to say the detective eventually gets the answers at considerable personal risk to himself. All in all it's a good detective story if somewhat familiar.

I did have a few problems with the novel. It seems to me that it's a cliched cheap shot to present all rural people as xenophobic bigots. Similarly presenting fundamentalist Christians as hypocrites is unfair and mean spirited. The novel also deconstructs its own theme that people should be tolerant of those who are different and have different values. Pronzini clearly doesn't show the same tolerance for small town rural people and fundamentalist Christians by presenting them in such a bad light.

I listened to the unabridged taped version which was read with appropriate style and inflection by John Michalski.