Vengeance

Kaminsky's new series starring freelance process server Lew Fonseca is loaded with vivid characters and the local color of Florida. One of his clients hires Lew to look into the disappearance of his trophy wife, and at the same time Lew starts looking for a teenage runaway who has been sold to a local vice king. Scott Brick's easy-going, relaxed style of narration draws the listener into Lew's life and work. Brick easily distinguishes the male and female characters with nuances of tone and modulation. With his keen sense of pacing, he adds to the suspense, drama, and surprising dénouement as Lew turns out to be a white knight in blue jeans. S.C.A. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

Starred review from August 30, 1999
The versatile and prolific Kaminsky introduces his fifth series hero, Lew Fonesca, in this outstanding mystery. Fonesca is a middle-aged, widowed process server, a transplanted Chicagoan who has made a new home in Sarasota, Fla. He joins a distinguished and varied stable of his Edgar Award-winning creator's other protagonists: a Russian policeman (Porfiry Rostnikov); a Chicago police detective (Abe Lieberman); a private detective to the stars (Toby Peters); and, of course, Jim Rockford. Fonesca is a friendly, unassuming, slightly depressed fellow who makes a meager salary working for several Sarasota lawyers. Occasionally he uses the investigative skills he developed while employed by the state attorney's office in Chicago to do a little ad hoc sleuthing. In his debut, his skills and fortitude get stretched to the limit as he tries to locate two missing persons: a teenage girl whose sexually abusive and violent father has lured her away from her poverty-stricken mother, and a woman who has run away from her wealthy husband. As always, Kaminsky's sense of place is faultless, and he skillfully captures a parade of lively, credible characters, including psychiatrists, truck drivers, pimps, teenagers and social workers. With an early hook, he grabs readers and takes them on a memorably tumultuous ride of violent dips and turns, careening from Sarasota's most squalid shacks to its richest condos.