Review: Top-level vacation reading
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 15, 2012
There is really only one Jake Scarne, but readers now have the opportunity to acquire Lawrence De Maria's two thrillers featuring the intrepid troubleshooter in one volume. A longtime journalist, De Maria seems to have saved his juiciest stories for his fiction. With compelling plot and characters and an authority in depicting worlds at once exotic and familiar, De Maria carries us along on rides that are thrilling and even cathartic as Scarne battles evil that is not found only in fiction.In "Sound of Blood," Jake Scarne tries to unravel the financial and criminal skullduggery behind a fiendishly clever murder. His nemesis is Victor Ballantrae, who shares traits of financier Allen Stanford and Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch. But Scarne's biggest problem is Alana Loeb, Ballantrae's second in command and an alluring woman with a mysterious past. Part of the mystery is whether our hero will end up playing the sap.Jake Scarne comes back in "Madman's Thirst," another potent mixture of mystery, murder, finance and corruption involving the brutal rape and murder of a teenage girl, a shadowy real estate magnate and our indomitable private eye with gourmet tastes. While the first novel reveled in the seediness of Florida, where the author currently lives, this one stays in Staten Island, where he began his journalism career. Scarne has to delve behind the scenes of big city power brokers, including greedy business interests and the best politicians money can buy, to find the criminals and bring them to justice.If you missed these fresh, entertaining mystery thrillers the first time around, now is the time to take advantage of this twofer and treat yourself to some top-level vacation reading.