Love and Fear

February 1, 2016
The fourth entry in the Gulliver Dowd series features a Mafia boss and a missing college student, but it's also about the power of love to motivate people to act beyond self-interest. Dowd is a private investigator with a melancholy outlook. When Tony, one of Mafia don Joey Vespucci's men, asks Dowd to look for the boss' college-age daughter, who has disappeared, Dowd turns down the case. Then the heavy reveals that he has a very personal interest in finding the girl: he is her biological father. Dowd reconsiders and takes the case, following the clues and bringing the mystery to a close with some unexpected results. Like his others in the Rapid Reads series, Coleman's hard-boiled noir is consistent with the style of the genre, and with simple yet descriptive language, it's well suited to the book's primary audienceadults with lower-level reading abilities. Although many of the characters often come off as mere stereotypes, Dowd is a sympathetic character, and the story is fast paced and appealing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)