Betrayers

May 10, 2010
MWA Grand Master Pronzini's Nameless Detective series is showing its age in the tepid 35th entry featuring the unnamed San Francisco PI (after 2009's Schemers). In the book's less than compelling first case, Nameless looks into a dispute over real estate that may be connected with a campaign of harassment, which includes a ghost and a cat poisoning. Nameless's side inquiry into how his daughter ended up with a box of cocaine in her bedroom doesn't raise the temperature much either. Meanwhile, one of his two partners, Tamara Corbin, pursues a private matter—tracking down the man who called himself Lucas Zeller when he slept with her. In another unrelated case, Nameless's other partner, Jake Runyon, goes after a bail jumper. Pronzini offers only superficial character insights, as shown by Tamara's realizing in the end that "she'd learned some things, some hard lessons. About men and relationships, about professional ethics and self-protection, about herself."

June 1, 2010

Thirty seven titles into their series (Schemers, 2009, etc.), the Nameless Detective and his mates get to work on some cases that are beyond personal.

It's probably just as well that there's so little billable stuff wending its way into the Nameless detective agency, because the non-billable stuff, the up-close-and-personal stuff, is hugely distracting. Consider what matters most to Tamara Corbin, for instance. The young, bright, black, in-your-face woman Nameless recently appointed to a partnership is so focused on payback that everything else in her life is Lilliputian. She's been dissed by a plausible scoundrel who weaseled his way into her bed and then made her feel stupid for allowing it to happen. Adding insult to injury, Antoine Delman had called her chubby. Convinced that hers is a scalp on a chock-full belt, Tamara mounts an investigation and soon enough discovers how right she is. Alisha and Antoine, a mother and son scam team, brazen, adept and immoderately profitable, have been eluding retribution for much too long. "The Delmans were going down," Tamara promises herself grimly. Meanwhile, both Nameless and Jake Runyon, his ace field man, are encountering family problems that can't be allowed to fester, the kind of knotty, often poignant problems that have made this low-key series irresistible.

Solid as ever, with funny, ballsy Tamara continuing to buff her role as designated scene-stealer.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 1, 2010
Even in partial retirement, the nameless detective cant extinguish his investigators instincts. His wife, Kerry, finds a small stash of cocaine in their adopted daughters bedroom. Emily says its not hers. Nameless believes her but is determined to find out who would ask a child to hold drugs. In the meantime, Nameless partner, Tamara, is still smarting from an encounter she had with a con man. Through a mutual friend, Tamara learns the con man has been approaching members of the black community, raising money to help black home owners avoid foreclosure. Exposing the scam would be sweet revenge, indeed. The firms third associate, Jake Runyon, is involved in what seems to be a simple bail-jump case that reveals itself to be much more deadly. As Nameless inches closer to retirement, Pronzini has taken to giving readers three cases per novel, one involving each of the agencys three principals. And, as always, each case reveals a little more of each character, which at this stage of the seriesmore than 30 novels plus short storiesis the greatest pleasure of all.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)