San Franciscan narrator Jake Diamond easily fits the traditional hard-boiled, whiskey-in-a-drawer, office-on-a-shoestring private eye mold. And the cryptic, hammered-out prose accentuates his dilemma: find the man who allegedly killed Jake's former mentor in Los Angeles. Jake finds his man but too late. Now he extends his search to the guy who wanted to purchase the dead pair's Ex-Con.com website business. The obligatory sultry ex-wife, characters with names like Willie Dogtail and Vinnie Stradivarius, and picturesque thugs complicate the plot and add to the atmosphere. Winner of the St. Martin's 2000 award for best first private eye novel.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Jimmy Pigeon is murdered, and his former student in the PI business, Jake Diamond, feels compelled to find out why. Diamond quickly discovers that Pigeon was in a business squabble with his partner, Harry Harding, about whether to sell their Web bounty-hunting business. When Harding is also murdered, Diamond becomes a suspect. Forced to use his Mob contacts to protect himself, Diamond goes on the lam, running between San Francisco and Los Angeles as he continues to search for the real murderer. First novelist Abramo has the hard-boiled private eye formula down pat--perhaps even too pat. Diamond exhibits every PI cliche in the book, from the bottle in his desk drawer to his antagonistic relationship with the police. On the other hand, the novel is solidly written and captures the mood of the genre. Its selection as the St. Martin's/Private Eye Writers of America Best First Private Eye Novel of 2000 seems a stretch, but the series does bear watching. Gary Niebuhr
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