Electric City

August 1, 1994
In a rambling adventure, following Amateur Night , Jane da Silva, Beck's Seattle sleuth who must investigate hopeless cases in order to inherit her eccentric uncle's fortune, searches for a missing woman, a recent winner of $20,000 on TV's Jeopardy! Irene March, employed by a news clipping service, has been missing for a week when two co-workers ask Jane to find her. Jane learns that Irene had developed a blackmailing operation using the news stories she came across in her job and that at least two of her victims--a woman exploiting her daughter to raise funds for a bogus operation and another whose distinctive car was seen leaving the scene of a hit-and-run accident--had reason to want Irene dead. When Irene's body is found at the bottom of a ravine, Jane sticks with the case and gets caught up in a complex chain of events that leads her into a confrontation with a killer in Electric City, near the Grand Coulee Dam. Although Beck gives readers an appealing tour of Washington State and provides Jane with a country-singer love interest, this tale is underpowered.

August 1, 1994
Under the conditions of her wealthy uncle's will, Jane da Silva (Amateur Night, Mysterious Pr., 1993) may keep her inheritance only if she investigates "unsolvable," pro bono cases. This time, concerned clipping-service co-workers of a missing woman ask for help. Jane soon discovers that the woman, a recent winner on TV's Jeopardy!, roamed the state as a blackmailer. She turns up dead, of course, while Jane traces her last moves. This plot, too, sounds familiar, but the refreshing heroine, Seattle surroundings, and secret-life subplot make for pleasant reading.

August 1, 1994
Beck may be one of the more underrated writers working in the female PI genre, but perhaps her latest Jane da Silva story will catapult her into the limelight. Jane has inherited lots of money from her uncle Harold with the stipulation that she continue the work of his beloved, Seattle-based Foundation for Righting Wrongs. So when two young people show up at her front door asking if she'll investigate the disappearance of their friend and coworker, Irene March, who was mousy, unloved, and beleaguered, Jane figures the case could be both absorbing and worthwhile. It turns out to something more than that, eventually involving her in both blackmail and murder. Beck's da Silva is daring, determined, clever, and spirited, and the novel's cleverly inventive, suspenseful plot is filled with odd twists and turns that will keep readers off balance. Some laugh-aloud humor and a little light romance round out this engrossing, thoroughly entertaining mystery. ((Reviewed August 1994))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1994, American Library Association.)