Reason to Kill

July 27, 2020
Jobs have been sparse lately for elderly L.A. PI Amos Parisman, the narrator of Weinberger’s appealing sequel to 2019’s An Old Man’s Game, until he receives a phone call from 75-year-old Pinky Bleistiff, the manager of a klezmer group called Dark Dreidel, whose members have been disappearing: first the drummer, then a violinist, and finally Risa Barsky, “the lady singer.” Amos soon discovers that the attractive 35-year-old Risa is much more to Pinky than just another songstress. Then, Pinky is murdered. His death is followed by that of Risa’s on-again, off-again boyfriend. Amos must discover the truth behind these crimes in a bid to keep an innocent person from going to prison. The tight plot is enriched with Amos’s wry observations (“Free is what you are when you don’t want to retire yet but nobody’s beating a path to your doorbell. It’s a terrible thing to be free like that”). Descriptions of Amos’s tender yet increasingly fragile feelings for his dementia-stricken wife add poignancy. Hopefully, Amos still has a long career ahead of him.

August 1, 2020
L.A. music promoter Pinky Bleistiff paid a goodly amount of money to bring a singer to California from New York. He was getting her some good gigs when she suddenly disappeared. Pinky hires a highly recommended PI, Amos Parisman, the star of Weinberger's recent An Old Man's Game (2020), to find her. Sixtysomething Amos, a leading figure in the trend of mysteries featuring senior sleuths, takes Pinky's job, but something about the case seems off. Why all this money to bring in a pretty good talent when L.A. is fairly crawling with fine, underemployed musicians? That's the real mystery Amos sets himself to solve, and when he learns the truth, he's thoroughly stunned, relying on his Jewish heritage to keep going and attempt to put the world back together?after all, he muses, "that's what Jews do." As with the earlier novel, the writing and detection are skilled, and the ambling pace is agreeable. Though a bit tamer than its predecessor, this is still an entertaining detective yarn.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)