The Other Side of Silence

August 4, 2008
The client: a woman in peril. The case: a missing person. The hero: an investigator. The complication: thugs and secrets. MWA Grand Master Pronzini (The Crimes of Jordan Wise
) has used this recipe effectively for nearly four decades, including in this highly competent, if somewhat mechanical, suspense novel set in Las Vegas and California’s Mohave Desert. While camping in the desert, Rick Fallon, a corporate security officer whose marriage has finally crumbled in the wake of his son’s accidental death, comes across Casey Dunbar, who’s tried and failed to kill herself after months of fruitlessly searching for her young son, who’s been abducted by her ex-husband. Fallon empathizes with the woman, and what follows is a good old-fashioned search-and-capture mission with all the usual Pronzini virtues: a simple yet disciplined prose style; a strong, multilayered central character; and a compelling plot that builds to a nice little closing twist.

September 1, 2008
Pronzini's latest stand-alone thriller is a prime example of the Chandleresque atmospherics and character-driven plots that have made his novels consistently entertaining. The authors landscape artistry is a main pleasure of this book: he makes the ever-changing colors of Death Valley come alive, andhe skewers Las Vegas as a creature that swallows up the surrounding landscape and entombs the people within it. Hero Rick Fallon has come unmoored: his marriage has finally ended after the death of the couples son three years previously. He visits Death Valley to recharge and stumbles upon an abandoned vehicle with a suicide note on the drivers seat. In a nice twist on the expectation that the hero will find a body, Fallon finds an almost-dead woman. Behind her suicide attempt is the husbands kidnapping of the couples son. Fallon takes up a knight-errant role for the woman, trying to salve his own loss by finding her son. The false notes in this book come from Pronzinis instantly morphing his everyman hero (once the head of security at a druge company) into Mr. Hard-Boiled Detective. Despite this awkward grafting, this is a stylishly written, achingly melancholy tale.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)