Review: Great setting, great characters and a trail of breadcrumbs
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 03 3, 2013
PI Eli Katz is rude, cocky, belligerent and funny. I liked him. Lisa, his sleep-over lady love, has "springy, frosted hair" -- a welcome relief from all the "unruly red curls" I have encountered lately in crime fiction. Then there’s Bertha, Eli’s assistant at The Katz Eye. Bertha has salt-and-pepper hair, and is "wearing her usual muumuu to hide her girth and satiny slippers to ease her bunions.” She’s as belligerent and lippy as her employer. I liked her.Against his better judgment Eli takes on a client named Mary, whose husband, a gifted architect, has gone missing. Eli and Mary tromp through San Francisco, asking questions and alienating some nasty people. Ambushed by a thug named Vittetoe, Mary is killed and Eli is left for dead, saved only by the sound of sirens.And there, at the halfway point, the story seems to slide off in another direction. We skip a whole year and end up in Amsterdam. Eli and Lisa are touring Europe. She drags him to concerts and restaurants. He nurses his plastic knee and obsesses over Mary's death, her missing husband and the vanished Vittetoe.In a walk through Haarlem, Eli spots something that triggers a memory. He is back on the case, as rude and belligerent as ever.At a museum in Munich, where he hopes to trace a bridge drawn by Mary's missing husband, Eli has this exchange with the director:*“There's a V2 rocket on display here, the kind that could have blitzed New York City back in forty-five. How is it you guys lost the war?”*He smiled coldly. “We ran out of gasoline, Mr. Katz. It was as simple as that.”Back in San Francisco, Big Bertha still answers the phone and checks the mail. Eli’s phone call puts her to work digging up information. He tracks down the missing husband's father in Scotland, and from there “It was like following a trail of breadcrumbs.” He flies home and pounds down the trail, bum knee and all, right up to an astonishing ending.I loved this book. It's all about setting and characters, but the plot is also a page turner.