Betrayers

May 10, 2010
MWA Grand Master Pronzini's Nameless Detective series is showing its age in the tepid 35th entry featuring the unnamed San Francisco PI (after 2009's Schemers). In the book's less than compelling first case, Nameless looks into a dispute over real estate that may be connected with a campaign of harassment, which includes a ghost and a cat poisoning. Nameless's side inquiry into how his daughter ended up with a box of cocaine in her bedroom doesn't raise the temperature much either. Meanwhile, one of his two partners, Tamara Corbin, pursues a private matter—tracking down the man who called himself Lucas Zeller when he slept with her. In another unrelated case, Nameless's other partner, Jake Runyon, goes after a bail jumper. Pronzini offers only superficial character insights, as shown by Tamara's realizing in the end that "she'd learned some things, some hard lessons. About men and relationships, about professional ethics and self-protection, about herself."

Nameless is a San Francisco detective who makes his 35th foray in Pronzini's series--since THE SNATCH in 1971. Listeners who enter the series at this point will find the limelight shared by Nameless's partners in the agency, Tamara and Jake Runyon. Each of the operatives has his or her own case, and in both Tamara and Nameless's cases "it's personal." Nick Sullivan portrays the operatives with broad strokes--Jake Runyon's voice rumbles gruffly, and you wonder how Sullivan can switch so easily to Tamara's African-American vernacular. The three cases run concurrently but are told in alternating chapters. Sullivan, a veteran of more than a dozen Nameless titles, keeps it straight for listeners. He also plays to the humanist side of the characters as they pursue the perps of relatively low-violence crimes. R.F.W. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine