β Scribed by Barnes, Linda
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Like Marcia Muller, Sue Grafton, and Sara Paretsky, Linda Barnes deserves credit for usurping the male dominance over American private-eye fiction in the 1970s and '80s. Her six-foot-tall, redheaded Boston snoop and part-time cabbie, Carlotta Carlyle, started out (in 1987's __) as a savvy, self-reliant former cop whose potential to become Sam Spade in a skirt was mitigated by her emotional sensitivity and resistance to brash risk-taking. More than two decades later, Carlotta shows herself to be as compelling and credible as ever--if a bit wiser--in Deep Pockets.
"Look, I made a mistake. I slept with a student," concedes Wilson Chaney, an African-American professor at Harvard Medical School, as he hires Carlotta to find and foil the person responsible for blackmailing him with love letters he'd sent to Denali Brinkman, a startlingly attractive freshman rowing champ who evidently committed both suicide and arson at a Charles River boathouse. Carlotta thinks to curtail this squeeze by unearthing information damaging to the extortionist. But when the suspect turns out to be another of Denali's boyfriends, 30-year-old ex-con Benjy Dowling, and then Dowling perishes in a hit-and-run involving Chaney's van, the PI must reassess both her tactics and assumptions about this investigation. Is her client, already afraid of losing his job over an ill-advised intimacy, now being framed for murder, perhaps by another one of Dowling's blackmail targets? Could Chaney's troubles be traced to a rival or enemy at Harvard? Or to his wealthy, pregnancy-obsessed wife? Or maybe to his cutting-edge research into drug treatments for attention-deficit disorder? As Carlotta confronts the case's multiplying puzzles, she wonders whether there are answers to be found in Denali's sketchy past--answers that could not only clear Chaney, but protect this gutsy gumheel from an increasingly dangerous adversary.
Carlotta's distractions in Deep Pockets are numerous, from her ebbing relationship with a black FBI agent to her concern over the half-dressing habits of her fast-developing "little sister," Paolina. Yet she rarely misses a clue--except, of course, when it adds to the story's tensions. Barnes fails to fully explain a couple of dramatic plot turns in this 10th Carlotta Carlyle novel (after __), and you needn't boast a Harvard sheepskin to figure out her tale's principal twist well in advance of its conclusion; however, those faults are outweighed by one's delight in seeing the pertinacious Ms Carlyle again get her man without entirely losing her femininity. --J. Kingston Pierce
In her 10th robust Carlotta Carlyle mystery (after 2002's The Big Dig), Barnes weaves an intricate web with a pleasingly poisonous spider at its center. African-American Harvard professor Wilson Chaney asks Boston PI Carlotta for help because someone is blackmailing him over his affair with Delani Brinkman, a seductive Harvard rowing star. When Delani turns up dead in a boathouse on the Charles, incinerated on a gasoline-soaked futon, a note left by the victim suggests suicide. But Brinkman herself remains quite the puzzleβa loner who slept with her kayak in her room, then abandoned her dorm to camp in the university boathouse: "Her mother was an American Indian.... Her father was Swiss, but she didn't learn that until much later. She had no brothers and sisters. She never went hungry, but there wasn't much kindness in her life." When Delani's ex-con boyfriend is killed by a hit-run driver on a dark city street, suspicion points back to the urbane Professor Chaneyβor does it? Almost every character carries a secret, including Carlotta, who's gingerly resuming her romance with a charming Mafioso. If a couple of red herrings aren't fully explained, Barnes makes superb use of town-gown tensions and the contrasting worlds of Harvard bureaucrats, blue-collar cons, the Brattle Street swells and more. The twists and turns in this nail-biter are at once startling without ever becoming absurd.
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