Cold Smoked

July 3, 1995
As readers familiar with her first three appearances know, Seattle's Jane da Silva (A Hopeless Case) is the beneficiary of a loopy trust: she gets money from her uncle's estate as long as she solves crimes for people who can't afford to hire a PI. Once through the slow opening chapters, readers will hook onto a sharp-witted puzzler with an abundance of red herrings (and salmon and cod) that will keep them guessing to the last page. Having taken a gig as a lounge singer in a tacky local hotel, Jane is entertaining a group from the salmon industry, in town for the international seafood show, when the earnest young reporter for Seafood Now bursts into the room screaming that there's a dead woman in her bathtub. Jane's subsequent investigation takes her to Norway and the Shetland Islands. Throughout, Jane remains good-natured while enjoying the absurdity around her as Beck offers a worldly tour of the fishing industry and environmental shenanigans before concluding this solid work with an unexpected, gleefully cynical climax.

May 1, 1995
Jane da Silva, the Seattle private eye whose inheritance limits her investigations to desperate, "unsolvable" cases only, looks into the death of a young seafood convention hostess. Roving from northern cod-fishing grounds to the Shetland Islands and back, Jane learns of sabotage, deceptive business practices, and further murder.

July 1, 1995
In her fourth outing, Beck's Jane da Silva faces her most challenging and unique case yet. Multitalented sometime-sleuth Jane is trying to make a few easy bucks singing at a Seattle seafood convention when one of the young women hired to play hostess to the piscatory crowd is murdered. The circumstances are fishy, to say the least, and the police are getting nowhere, so Jane takes matters into her own hands, posing as a writer for the leading fish journal, touring briny seafood plants, and ingratiating herself with the fishing industry's best and brightest to find out who killed the seemingly innocent hostess. There's plenty of humor and more than one unexpected surprise as Jane, in her usual no-nonsense manner, gets to the bottom of things. In other hands, this story could have been just plain silly, but the combination of Beck's clever plotting, unique heroine, smooth style, and fine, understated humor earn "Cold Smoked" a thumbs-up for fun. ((Reviewed July 1995))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1995, American Library Association.)