Customer Reviews

Stealing for a Living

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Naomi Rand has joined the small number of authors whose books I buy in hardback because I can't wait for the paperback edition. This is the second book in her series about Emma Price, an investigator for the Capitol Defender's Office. When we last left Emma, she was 40, pregnant, about to be divorced, and beginning a new relationship with a New York City detective, Lawrence Solomon. Over a year has passed and now Emma is dealing with a baby and a troubled pre-teen at home, a difficult boss at work, and building her relationship with Solomon. While Emma is busy trying to find mitigating circumstances so that her obviously guilty client can avoid the death penalty, Solomon is investigating a murder of a social activist who was an important person in Emma's past. Both cases are interesting and we learn more about Emma who is a richly drawn, complex character whom I like very much and am eager to encounter when the next book in the series is published.

Stealing for a Living is much than a mystery. The character at the center of the story is razor-sharp and a compelling narrator. Great ideas throughout, and a great plot, too.

This book is filled with rich characters, starting with Emma Price and Lawrence Solomon and including even the seemingly minor characters. The story takes you way beyond who killed Dr. Eleanor Hammond, a doctor who performs abortions. It examines the various hatreds and prejudices of humans in general and is full of insight and compassion. An excellent read.

Though she raises a toddler and is dealing with her teenage son arrested for shoplifting, Emma Price knows that her time in Brooklyn as a single mother feels like heaven compared to her current assignment as a New York City Capital Defender's Office investigator. Emma is to uncover anything that will enable Roland Everett to avoid the obvious death penalty. When his injury compensation claim was rejected Roland retaliated by killing three people.

While Emma struggles with finding anything to help her "client", her lover, Brooklyn Homicide Detective Laurence Solomon, is working on the execution of abortion-rights activist Dr. Eleanor Hammond. Emma knew Eleanor and the woman's family when she was a child, but found nothing redeeming in any of her relationships with any of the Hammond brood so she wonders why she thinks a friend was killed. Though an anti-abortion group claims the credit, Emma believes that this homicide is more domestic in nature and begins her own inquiries.

In some ways STEALING FOR A LIVING is a simplistic look at evil, yet paradoxically that is why the second Emma Price novel (see THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY) is a superb investigative tale as Naomi Rand focuses on the rationalization for murder justifiable in the killers' minds. Fans of urban mysteries will appreciate this novel as Emma struggles on all fronts, whether it is at home in Brooklyn, in her competition with her lover on the Hammond homicide, or failing to find a redeeming quality for a malevolent bigot who she believes deserves death.

Harriet Klausner

This is my first (and last) Naomi Rand novel. Without all of the extraneous excursions into the land of descriptive retoric this book would be a solid 25 pages long. Besides a weak plot development Ms. Rand could not resist adding descriptions of everything from a brightly decorated Christmas/Santa Clause house in a Jewish neighborhood to a freeway backup and her reliance on NPR to inform her as to how to get home.

I mean, come on! Get on with the story. I decided to force myself to the end only to find a weak, off topic conclusion to an otherwise dull book. The one star rating is for the Award she got for writing, not for this book. Don't waste your time!

The first half of the book I enjoyed enough to keep reading, although I had a bit of trouble keeping all the characters straight. About half way through I felt like pages or chapters were missing. The story line jumped around erratically, there was a random character name thrown in who didn't appear anywhere else, and it just felt very disjointed. There was tons of detail about streets and suburbs if you were familiar with that area of NYC (which I'm not), but it just left me feeling like an outsider (what's Ditmas - a street, a suburb, a restaurant?). There are too many characters to keep up with and too little detail to make them real or connected in a meaningful way. Additionally, this working single mother, Emma, has two young children but appears to never have to shop for food, do laundry, get gas, or find a babysitter. For me, it was too much detail on unimportant things and too little believability in the actual juggling of daily life for Emma.

The major part of the story relates to the murder of a woman, Dr. Eleanor Hammond, who was a kind of surrogate mother to Emma, the heroine. Emma had ended her relationship with Dr. Hammond over 20 years before, at the same time that Eleanor's son Josh, the best friend of Emma's youth, left home, never to return or communicate with his mother again. After a long build up, when the Dark Secret explaining this family breakdown was revealed, I felt like saying "you're kidding, right?" -- I just cannot believe the cause as giving rise to the consequence, and that lessened my enjoyment.

Meanwhile, another plot line concerns Emma's actual job, which requires her to investigate the circumstances of a multiple murder, hoping for mitigating circumstances. Unfortunately, this plot line goes nowhere and I wonder what point it is supposed to make.

On the plus side, the characters were interesting enough to keep me reading, even though I didn't particularly like any of them. I will probably read the author's next work, to see what befalls the continuing players.

I have not read this book. Therefore, I have awarded it a Harriet Klausner 5. But any book, without exception, reviewed by Harriet Klausner is tripe. And without exception, any review written by Harriet Klausner is tripe. This lowbrow woman couldn't get past the opening page of an Iris Murdoch novel.

Don Francisco Coffee