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PRETTY BALLERINA: A NOVEL
Wessel, John
1998 10016629 Despite quick wit and compelling action, PI hero Harding suffers the gentlest of sophomore slumps in the comparatively spare follow-up to Wessel's highly acclaimed This Far, No Further. Retired slasher/porn star Cassie Rayn is in Chicago for some convention actionAher early films, which she made when she was a very illegal 16 (the title relates to one of them), fetch top dollar in the collector market. What few people know is that she's really Kalani Moon, the sole survivor of a headline-making bloodbath that occurred 20 years ago when her father murdered the rest of the family and then hanged himself. Two years before the murders, her brother Kim disappeared; now she's been getting oddly worded fliers that might be a message from him. When Harding agrees to track Kim down, he finds those fliers everywhere and, in time-honored PI style, attracts a lot of attentionAfrom a trio of apartment-robbing punks; a mysterious Vietnamese with a cowboy-movie fixation; and a goon from the LA mob, all of whom are after Cassie for reasons of their own. On its own merits, this is a complex, fast-moving mystery told primarily through dialogue and interviews (a lot of interviews), but the depth and detail of Wessel's first Harding novel are nowhere to be found. As a result, this book reads like a draft still waiting for atmosphere and observation. While it proves that Wessel's no fluke, it will probably leave most readers wanting more, and not just for the right reasons. Author tour. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Ex-con/private eye Harding, who first appeared in This Far, No Further (LJ 6/15/96), is hired for what seems like an open-and-shut case of breaking and entering. His employer, Cassie, is the fading star of such B-movies as Humped to Death, a somewhat free adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III. Cassie wants Harding to break into the house where she lived as a child and where everyone else in her family had been killed years before. While Harding can jimmy the lock on the house and is even quicker with a quip, he's not quite so adept at eluding Cassie's pursuers?now his as well. Wessel's serviceable plot is useful mainly as a vehicle to showcase a deranged but entertaining array of Chicago characters. Although the publisher's publicity machine compares Wessel to Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy, he seems to lack Chandler's moral judgment and to be merely a visitor to rather than a resident of Ellroy's dark places. However, fans of up-and-coming wisecracking mystery novelists might want to add Wessel's name to the top of their list. Simon & Schuster 0-684-81464-1 / 9780684814643
Paperback As New Condition
Price:
10.00 USD
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