From Publishers Weekly
A gay, manic-depressive, thoroughly disreputable ex-con with a violent streak, Tony Brady is also vibrantly alive and capable of dropping insightful quotes from Genet, Baldwin or Maupin gleaned from his prison reading. At the beginning of this slang-filled noir caper from London, Tony has settled in to a sweet racket with a former cellmate from Wormwood Scrubs, Elias Rasheed Mohammed?Reed for short. Together they conduct a useful little business finding lost items, even if they have to make the items disappear so that they can recover them for the grateful owners. Tony is approached by a wealthy builder named Jack Dunphy and asked to find his runaway teenage daughter. With Reed and little effort he succeeds. The problem is that the Brixton tough the daughter is with isn't going to give her up easily. And when Reed and Tony decide to play both ends against the middle, violence is the inevitable result. Bruen combines jazz, drugs, sex and violence into a heady brew that goes down easy and leaves a long aftertaste.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The job is to find the girl. Given that Roz is white, upper crust, and reported to be in Brixton, a predominantly black section of London, it seems simple enough. But just as in Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely, things go wrong quickly. The girl's father is Jack Dunphy, a big shot in the building trades with a fancied resemblance to the actor Gene Hackman (hence the title). And Roz is being kept by Leon, a debonair but ruthless black club-owner in Brixton. The detective on the case is Tony Brady, who will be the first to tell you that he is gay, manic-depressive, and on the wrong side of 50. During this case he is stuck in manic mode, with the emphasis distinctly on nonstop action. When Brady decides to earn his fortune by playing Dunphy off against Leon, the bullets fly fast, and, for those seeking a dollop of pop culture, so do the allusionsAeverything from Anne Sexton and Armistead Maupin to the Three Stooges. Some of the references (e.g., the Big Issue, a magazine hawked by U.K. homeless) may be unfamiliar here, but readers of hard-boiled British mysteries such as those by Quintin Jardine and Ian Rankin should enjoy this gritty page-turner.ABob Lunn, Kansas City P.L., MO
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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