Amazon.com: Hastened to the Grave: The Gypsy Murder Investigation (Hasand to Grave): Jack Olsen: Books

Amazon.com
Jack Olsen's Hastened to the Grave: The Gypsy Murder Investigation features a delightful hero: a female private investigator who calls herself "Rat Dog Dick." Rat Dog relies on an ancient Everex 286 computer (Evil Evie), a Toyota Tercel (The Frog Prince) that is so outrageously green it's useless for surveillance, and a big, funny-looking dog (Beans). She is probably the best skip tracer (someone who finds people) in San Francisco. Once she gets her teeth into the "Foxglove" case--several old people who dwindle and die quickly after being "befriended" by a local Gypsy family--the fact that she has no client to pay her for her work is just not an issue. The police are ignoring clear evidence of elder abuse, and Rat Dog is outraged. We follow every step of her adventures as she learns a whole lot about Gypsies and turns into a fierce advocate for the elderly.

Jack Olsen's prose style is supple and engaging, with funny dialogue and colorful characters worthy of an Elmore Leonard novel. His observations about people (especially women) are priceless, and his account of Gypsy crime and police negligence is balanced and thought-provoking. Hastened to the Grave is a true crime classic by a master at the top of his form. --Fiona Webster --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Author of 27 books (Salt of the Earth, etc.), Olsen has found a winning protagonist in Fay Faron, the straight-shooting, busty blonde proprietress of Rat Dog Dick, a down-and-out San Francisco detective agency comprised of Faron and her trusty mutt, Beans. Olsen's latest true-crime saga begins when Faron is hired by a lawyer friend to check out Danny Tene, who the lawyer suspects is bilking an elderly client out of her life savings. When the client turns up dead, Faron suspects murder. Her investigation leads her to the shady and mysterious world of the Tene Bimbo clan (the family Peter Maas chronicled in King of the Gypsies), and six more bodies, all elderly men, all seemingly seduced by Tene women as far back as 1984 and duped into giving the women their money and property. Apparently not content to wait for the natural demise of their aging charges, the Tenes allegedly dosed them with the heart medication digitalis, which acts as a slow, difficult-to-detect poison. Faron finally gets the police to act on the evidence she's uncovered; as of the writing of this book, the supposed perpetrator of the so-called Foxglove murderer (named for the plant that produces digitalis) was still to go to trial (Olsen concludes with the November 1997 indictments). As the trial promises to be fascinating in its own right, readers with an interest in the case would have been better served by a definitive account. Even so, Olsen does his usual professional job here, turning in a brisk, well-researched treatment of murders most foul. 8 pages of b&w photos, not seen by PW. Literary Guild, Mystery Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternates.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Hastened to the Grave: The Gypsy Murder Investigation (Hasand to Grave) (Mass Market Paperback)

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