Amazon.com: Dark Lady: Richard North Patterson: Books

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Dashiell Hammett, a master of big city crime fiction, would have enjoyed Richard North Patterson's latest thriller, set in a fictional Midwestern city called Steelton. This burnt-out burg is located on the shores of Lake Erie--and is a place bitterly divided by politics. The construction of a $275 million baseball stadium threatens to be Steelton's downfall rather than its redemption.

Arthur Bright is the prosecutor of Erie County, but he wants to become mayor. His campaign attacks the new ballpark as a boondoggle, "a shameful diversion of public financing from such pressing needs as better schools, better housing, and safer streets." His protégé, Assistant County Prosecutor Stella Marz is 38, ambitious, and has been dubbed "the dark lady" by various defense lawyers. If Arthur wins the mayoral race, she intends to become prosecutor herself. But two murders involving drugs and twisted sex threaten her future.

First, Tommy Fielding, the project manager for Steelton 2000 (as the new home of the Steelton Blues will be called), is found dead in the company of a hooker--both apparently having overdosed on heroin. The fact that Fielding was gay and had never used drugs before bothers Stella and Chief Detective Nathaniel Dance. Their worries are soon pushed aside by another, more shocking murder--Jack Novak, a defense lawyer, is discovered hanging from his closet door, castrated and dressed in drag. Jack was once Stella's lover--and he was also one of Bright's largest contributors. For Stella, the murders are too close to home. "Maybe this is about me. But I have to see it through."

Dark Lady is shrouded by the dark clouds of deceit and greed, and the sleek structure of Steelton 2000 dominates the landscape like a Dr. Frankenstein's Castle with luxury boxes. --Dick Adler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Patterson (Degree of Guilt; No Safe Place) has advanced considerably from his earlier, rather glib commercial thrillers. His world now seems much more somber, his characters more ridden with real-world angst; only a tendency to melodramatic flourishes and a certain narrative slickness suggest the pop writer he once was. His setting this time is Steelton, a grim Midwestern city on a lake that went into the dumps when its steel mills folded, and whose ambitious mayor wants to help revive it with an expensive sports stadium. The stadium seems to be good for the city and its suffering minority workers, but who really stands to gain? And what role does the shadowy mafia capo who runs the city's drug trade play in the proceedings? What about the plucky black mayoral candidate who sees the stadium as a rip-off by which the rich get richer? Against this highly detailed and well-observed background, Patterson introduces Stella Marz, chief of homicide in the local prosecutor's office, and a woman not without her own ambitions. She has personal demons to overcome: a wretchedly unhappy childhood, an unwise affair in her youth with a flashy lawyer who became the drug king's mouthpiece. Now the lawyer, and one of the top execs in the stadium company, have been found dead, in bizarre circumstances that suggest they both lived exotic secret lives. It is Stella's job, with the aid of a police chief whose motives she never quite grasps, to sort all this out. Patterson has devised a fiendishly complex plot combining financial shenanigans in high places, police corruption, political pressures and, ultimately threats, to Stella's sanity and life, all resolved in a High Noon-style windup that leaves Steelton and Stella only slightly better off than they began. Patterson's attempt to go beyond commercial formulas to create real, contemporary American drama is admirable, but somewhat undermined by, for example, a reader's realization that a character with an adorable small daughter cannot, in the nature of Patterson's fiction, be a villain. Literary Guild main selection; Random audio and large print editions. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Dark Lady (Paperback)

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